August 31, 2011
- A well-known scientist just pointed something out to me that he found
on the CD of FBI documents that the National Academy of Sciences
released back in March. Pages 32 through 44 in Batch 1, module 9
on the CD, are a February 22, 2004 report titled "Stable Isotope
Characteristics of Anthrax Sample SPS 02.266." (SPS 02.266 is the Leahy
spores.) The report is by Drs. James Ehleringer and Helen
Kreuzer-Martin of the University of Utah. The section that was
brought to my attention is on page 34 and reads as follows:

With these important
limitations, the isotope
ratio data from sample 02.266 are

* inconsistent with the spores
having been produced with water from
Dugway Proving Ground

* inconsistent with the spores
having been grown in liquid medium made
with any known meteoric water source

* consistent
with the spores having been
grown on solid medium, perhaps for an extended period of time.

So, the findings by Ehleringer and Kreuzer-Martin show the Leahy spores
probably weren't from Dugway, and appear to have been grown on agar
plates over an "extended period of time." There's a lot of
scientific data in the report explaining this, but to me (and to the
scientist who contacted me) it seemingly confirms
very nicely what I've been saying for a long time: The attack spores
most likely came from agar plates inoculated with spores from flask
RMR-1029 that were allowed to grow until all the media was consumed and
the plates were entirely covered with growth. And, the only place
where that was routinely done at USAMRIID was in autoclave bags that
were allowed to lay around for weeks in Bruce Ivins' lab before they
were put into the autoclave, plus other bags that Ivins allowed to
remain in the autoclave for long periods of time before the autoclave
was turned on to sterilize the materials inside.

I just love it when new
pieces fall neatly into place to confirm a well-developed hypothesis.

August 30, 2011 (B) -
I couldn't find any way to write a worthwhile comment about the anthrax
threat received by late-nite TV talk show host Craig
Ferguson earlier this month, but a column by Benjamin Radford on
LiveScience.com titled "American
Anthrax Terrorists Return" mentions the Ferguson indicident among
others. The point of the column seems to be a warning that
American nut cases may use the 10th anniversary of the anthrax attacks
to send out other wave of hoax anthrax letters, just the way they did
following World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the anthrax attacks in
2001. A couple paragraphs from Radford's column are particularly
interesting:

Historically, however, it is not
foreign Muslim extremists but instead Americans — often Christians —
who have been responsible for the vast majority of anthrax terrorism.
For example, Clayton Waagner, an anti-abortion activist, reportedly
admitted sending nearly 300 anthrax hoax letters in the months after
Sept. 11, 2001. Last year a Connecticut man, Roland Prejean, was
charged with sending more than 50 anthrax hoax threats to government
officials and buildings, and in April a Seattle woman sent a package of
white powder and a note referencing anthrax to the White House;
it was addressed to President Obama's wife and daughters.

And

Many of these anthrax hoaxers are in
professions we have come to see as heroes: Chicago county
prosecutor James Vasselli resigned after admitting that he put an
envelope of sugar in a coworker's desk; a Kentucky sheriff planted
unmarked envelopes of crushed aspirin on desks; a Chicago postal worker
wrote "antrax enclosed" on a package as a prank; an unnamed Washington,
D.C.-Capitol Police officer was suspended for leaving a note and
powdery substance in an office building; two Philadelphia police
officers were charged with sending an anthrax hoax from their patrol
car computer; and so on.

And, of course, there was
an "American Anthrax Terrorist" named Bruce Edwards Ivins, a respected
scientist whom many people still cannot believe would do such a thing
as sending out real threat letters
filled with real anthrax.

August 30, 2011 (A)
- The person in Minnesota who contracted inhalation anthrax close to a
month ago has been identified, and he's doing well. According to
the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune, a pair of tourists from Florida, Dan Anders and his
wife of 36 years, Anne, had been on a vacation visiting the national
parks in
Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. While they were visiting
friends in
Pelican Rapids, MN, Dan started feeling "punky." Two
days later, he was in the hospital fighting for his life. Dan is
61
years old, which probably supports the observation that elderly people
do not need to be exposed to many spores to become infected.

The couple, who live in St.
Petersburg, had never been to the Upper Midwest before July, when they
flew to Fargo to begin their long-awaited trip. They rented a car and
drove west -- to Yellowstone and to Wind Cave National Park and Custer
State Park in South Dakota. "All the dirt roads and ponds, we saw it
all," Anne said.

Dan, who is retired from the
irrigation business, occasionally picked up garnets and other rocks to
use in making jewelry. The couple drove through a herd of bison, but
got no closer than any other tourists did, he says.

There's nothing in the
article about the previous incident where it was said that their family
had bad
experiences with the media, and that's why their names had not been
released to the media until now. And, Dan Anders' case seems to
be more
"mysterious" than "suspicious," so the suggestions from conspiracy
theorists that there
might be some kind of cover-up were clearly unwarranted and just
examples of Anthrax Truther paranoia.

Unlike the case of Bob Stevens, who was initially thought to have
contracted inhalation anthrax from "natural sources," but who later
turned out to have been killed by an anthrax letter, this seems to be a
true case of getting anthrax from "natural sources."
Unfortunately, they still haven't figured out where or how Dan
encountered the spores.

August 28, 2011
-
Hmm. I had a dramatic drop in visitors yesterday, no doubt the
result of power outages from Hurricane Irene, which also gave people on
the East Coast who have power something else to check out via the
Net.

I can also tell that kids are going back to school. The average
number of visitors to my web site has jumped by about 100 per
day. In the seven days prior to yesterday, I had three days with
over 600 visitors and no days with less
than 500 visitors. And I had an unusual number of visits from
people linking
in
via Stumbleupon.com, which
seems to be a site new students use when they first get a computer of
their
own and want to see what the Web has to offer.

Of course, some of that activity may be a prelude to the upcoming tenth
anniversaries of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks of 2001. There's no
way to
tell for certain.

Last week, I managed to finish Chapter 24 of my book, which had me
bogged down for
a long time. I'm still
not sure I got everything from that period in time that I need to
get. Ivins second cleaning of his office in April of 2002
has a lot of unexplained aspects to it. He did it in direct
conflict with his boss Patricia Worsham's instructions.
Why? He was obviously trying to destroy evidence, but what else
was he trying to accomplish? He seems to have done it for some
additional reason, but I can't get a handle on what that reason
was. I've been trying
to get inside Ivins' head when he did things, but what was on his mind
in that instance is still unclear. I'll just have to do revisions
if something occurs to me. I also finished Chapter 25, and I'm
currently on Chapter 26, at about page 200. And I came up with a
good title for the book. Unfortunately, I can't mention it in
this comment or on the Internet. If I did, someone else might use
it first.

Last week, I spent at lot of time writing complex comments for the
discussions on Dr.
Meryl Nass's
web site. Some of the discussions are really thought-provoking.

In one
part of the discussion, we got into the basics of
communication. Here are some quotable thoughts from well-known
people on the subject of communication:

But
communication is two-sided - vital and profound communication makes
demands also on those who are to receive it... demands in the sense of
concentration, of genuine effort to receive what is being communicated.Roger
SessionsExtremists
think "communication" means agreeing with them.Leo
RostenGood
communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard
to sleep after.Anne
Morrow Lindbergh

Communication is
classically defined
as someone speaking and someone else listening and understanding.
It can be very difficult
because others interpret
and misinterpret what you say and write.
In my comments on Nass's site, I specifically wrote about
"interpretation" and how what I write is
interpreted by the other person, and what the other person writes is
interpreted by me. I'm awaiting a response to see if what I wrote
was interpreted correctly.

In another
part of the discussion, one of the people posting as "Anonymous"
wrote about the excellent 1957 movie "Twelve Angry Men,"
which is about 12 jurors debating the fate of a young man on trial for
murdering his father. It shows how people bring their own
personal history, fears, habits and biases into a jury room. Some
are leaders, some are followers, some are filled with hate, some are
just there because the were picked for jury duty and don't really care
about the case, they just want to get back home. Here's how
"Anonymous" interpreted that movie as it pertains to me:

I see Mister Lake as a
composite of the Lee J Cobb, EG Marshall, and Ed Begley characters. And
like Cobb and Begley, Mister Lake is too vehement by half.

The jurors "Anonymous" mentions are all angry, aggressive and
biased. I, of course, see myself as the Henry Fonda character,
the lone, calm and cool person who sets aside all prejudices and biases
and looks only at the
evidence. In the movie, Henry Fonda starts out as the only
person who thinks the evidence does not show the defendant guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt. Fonda has reasonable
doubts. But, the others all vote guilty. So, they have to
communicate or they'll never get out of the jury room and back
home. By the time the movie ends, Fonda has persuaded everyone
else that there is reasonable doubt about the young man's guilt.
And, that's how they vote: Not guilty.

That's my roll in Nass's forum; I'm the calm, cool loner who has to
convince a bunch of angry people to look at what the evidence
says. But, in the Ivins case, the
evidence says that Bruce Ivins was guilty. And, I'm
arguing with biased people who personally knew Ivins and can never
accept that they didn't notice he was a mass murderer. And I'm
arguing with people who are mindlessly biased against the government
and do not trust anything the government says. And I'm arguing
with people who have theories of their own about who did it, and
although they have absolutely no credible evidence to support their
theories,
they still want to let Ivins go.

In the fictional "Twelve Angry Men," Henry
Fonda introduces evidence he found on his own, evidence which
was not presented in the trial, and Fonda uses that evidence to change
the minds of a few jurors. I live in a world where Henry Fonda's
character would get thrown in jail for doing that, and the trial would
be declared a mistrial.
In Henry Fonda's fictional movie world, he was able to change
everyone's mind in 93 minutes (the length of the movie). In the
real world, I've been
arguing for three years that
the evidence says Ivins was guilty, and I don't know if I've changed a
single mind.

But, it's interesting how an Anthrax Truther interprets "Twelve Angry
Men" to fit his beliefs about Ivins, while I interpret "Twelve Angry
Men" to fit my belief: that it is just a very good fictional movie.

August
27, 2011
- Proving that anger and logical thinking are nearly always
incompatible, Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Laurie Garrett was interviewed
on NPR yesterday. She admits to being "indignant" about
9/11 and the anthrax attacks, but the interviewer says it's "controlled
anger." Maybe. But it's still anger and her thinking about
the anthrax attacks appears to be mostly illogical and somewhat
irrational. Garrett proclaims,

more than three years ago,
I decided that the entire FBI investigation was not only, you know,
Three Stooges writ large but that they - that they had been steered
onto a targeting that was 100 percent incorrect.

Who steered the FBI? She didn't say. Why did it take years
to find Ivins among the massive list of possible suspects. She
doesn't say. But, she suggests that the only reason they picked
Ivins was because he committed suicide and could not defend
himself. Garrett also claims that, before Ivins there were
"10 others" whose lives were "completely destroyed" by being named in
the investigation. Hmm. Really? I can think of a two
or three names, but ten?
She says,

They were deported and have never been
allowed back in America, or they were driven to suicide, or they
were publicly humiliated, lost their careers, lost marriages,
everything imaginable because the FBI never had a way of doing an
investigation that would end up in a courtroom.

Hmm. She appears to be talking about people who had absolutely
nothing to do with the anthrax investigation, but who were caught up in
the post-9/11 hunt for al Qaeda sympathizers. Garrett declares:

I get outraged because the
FBI completely botched the investigation on the anthrax. I get outraged
because there's so much evidence that al-Qaida was behind the anthrax
mailings and that at least as strong a circumstantial case as was made
against Bruce Ivins can be made against al-Qaida even stronger.

To support her beliefs, she dredges back up all the dismissed nonsense
about the gash on Al Haznawi's leg he got
from bumping into a suitcase (which she mistakenly recalls as being a
spider bite), and about the false
positive tests for anthrax in caves in Afghanistan which she mistakenly believes were actual
positives. She says,

I think the greatest
mistakes were all made at the federal level.

Possibly, but she should
have provided solid facts and evidence instead of just her own
personal, vague, distorted and often mistaken
recollections about what the facts were.

The interview suggests that Garrett was totally outraged by 9/11 and
that event distorted her thinking about everything the federal
government has done since then. She demonstrates that anger and
logical thinking are usually incompatible. August 24, 2011
- Arguing with Anthrax Truthers can be very tedious, since they'll make
firm claims about things that are really matters of interpretation or
opinion. For example, yesterday, an
Anthrax Truther suggested that Jonathan Tucker did a "180" in his
opinions about Ivins' guilt when writing the article for WMD
Junction. What is the basis for that suggestion? It's
the fact that what Tucker wrote doesn't jibe with what someone else believed to be Tucker's
opinion.

And, on
Dr. Nass's site, I'm in an argument about "material evidence"
versus "circumstantial evidence." This Anthrax Truther
argues: "Circumstantial ya got. Material ya ain't got!" I made
the mistake of arguing that "material evidence" is the same as relevant circumstantial
evidence. But, after reading some legal dictionaries more
carefully, and after thinking about it a bit, "material evidence" is
supposedly circumstantial evidence that is both relevant and significant.
And what is "significant" can be entirely a matter of opinion.
"Material evidence" is supposed to be something that would hurt the
prosecution's (or defense's) case if it couldn't be entered as
evidence. A "material witness" is the best example, where the entire case for the
prosecution (or defense) might depend upon the testimony of that
witness.

In the Amerithrax case, as another example, in the return address on
the senate letters, Ivins used
the ZIP code for the area where his father's ancestors lived for over a
hundred years. It might not hurt the prosecution's case if that
evidence was left out, in order to save time and court costs.
That could make it seem
"immaterial." But, it could be argued by the prosecution that it is "material," because it helps
establish a pattern and Ivins' interest in hiding coded messages in
things he wrote, thus linking Ivins to "coded messages" in the senate
letters as well as in the media letters.

The "tedious" part of responding to arguments from Anthrax Truthers
about such matters is that, if I'm not extremely careful in every word I
write, they'll find something to generate a dozen new arguments.
But, then again, even if I am
extremely careful about every word I write, they'll probably still find
something to generate new arguments.

The reason I let myself get into such "tedious" arguments is because
they sometimes produce terrific ideas. When everyone is in
agreement, there are almost never any new ideas. When people are
in total disagreement, the debate can make you look at things from a
totally different angle you never considered before. In arguments
with Anthrax Truthers, there is no chance of anyone changing sides, but
there's always the chance of finding a sharp new point to make.
Plus, the writing of arguments teaches one to write more concisely and
precisely. August 23, 2011 (B)
- An outfit called The
Nonproliferation Review has a web site called WMD Junction, and
on that site is an
article dated August 22 by Jonathan Tucker,
a biologist who was also an arms control expert who specialized in
chemical and biological weapons. In the article, Tucker states
what I've been stating for many months (and again two days ago), that
Ivins
could easily have air-dried the attack spores and didn't need
a lyophilizer. The article was prompted by the depositions of
Ivins scientist friends from USAMRIID in the Stevens
vs USA lawsuit. Tucker wrote:

While the
scientists' depositions appear compelling at first glance, many of the
statements are misleading. First, much has been made of the specialized knowledge
needed to prepare dry powders of B. anthracis
spores, yet this factor may have
been exaggerated. Early reports that the spores contained a high
level of silicon suggested that they could have been deliberately
"weaponized" by coating them with silica to reduce static clumping and
facilitate their delivery as a fine-particle aerosol. FBI scientists
later determined, however, that the silicon was not on the surface of
the spores but had been incorporated into an inner layer called the
endosporium when the anthrax bacteria were grown and induced to
sporulate. Thus,
Ivins would not have needed weapons-related expertise to process the
spores.

Tucker then steps through all the information showing that the spores
were very likely air-dried, and he writes:

Based on this
information, it appears that Ivins could have dried the spores without
the need for a lyophilizer by using a low-tech method, such as
heat-drying the concentrated slurry on glass plates and then
harvesting the dried material inside a sealed glove box. Indeed, the
brownish discoloration and coarse texture of the first spore
preparation suggest the use of a crude production method.

And Tucker's view on Ivins' guilt is summarized this way:

Although the FBI's
circumstantial case against Bruce Ivins will never satisfy hard-core
skeptics and conspiracy theorists, the mosaic of evidence is fairly
convincing when viewed as a whole.

The depositions by Ivins friends seem to claim that, if Ivins wasn't officiallytrained to do something, then he
couldn't possibly know how to do it -- even something as simple as air
drying spores. It's like saying he couldn't possibly know how to
put a Band-Aid on a cut if he didn't have a medical degree.

When Tucker wrote the article, he was waiting for a security clearance
to go to work for the Department of Homeland Security. So, to
conspiracy theorists that would mean he wanted to be part of "the
government," and he was willing to go along with "the government's"
findings on everything. Presumably, the conspiracy theorists
believe that Tucker must have taken some kind of "Oath of Evil"
declaring that he would dispute the beliefs of conspiracy theorists and
True Believers at every opportunity, and that's why he wrote what he
wrote.

August 23, 2011 (A)
- I've been studying the
361 page containment report about Ivins' April 2002 unauthorized
swabbing that was recently brought to my attention, hoping that it
would help me figure out where things were located in Bacteriology
Suite 3 (Suite B3). But, the report only confused things
further. I had thought Ivins' BSL-3 lab was in room B303, but
page 252 of the report says that room B303 was an "administrative
office" where supplies were also stored. (It was one of the rooms
mentioned in a search warrant.)

So, the passbox for getting dangerous materials into Suite B3 went from
a lounge into an office? Does that make any
sense?

And when Ivins used a keypad to get into his BSL-3 lab, the log showed
"B301 KEYPAD" when he was entering room B313? Does that make any
sense? Ivins was able to spend many hours inside Suite B3
without ever using the keypad. I thought that meant there were
also BioSafety Level-2 areas inside Suite B3, but the keypad may just
have been the equivalent of a lock for his personal BSL-3 lab. I
dunno.

And, on page 149 and 150 the containment reports says the airlock was
supposed to be used to transport supplies in and out of Suite B3.
People bringing in supplies were not supposed to go any further than
the floor-drain in the center of the airlock, and people outside Suite
B3 were not supposed to meet people from inside Suite B3 in the
airlock. Yet, when Ivins went out the "back door" of Suite B3
into the Animal Resources (AR) hallway, he always went
through the regular door, not through the airlock. Why did the
regular door exist if the
airlock was supposed to be the way in and out? It's like a comedy
routine where there's a huge vault door that people are supposed to use
even though there are no walls around the area behind the vault door.

I'b being told that I need to contact some people who have actual
knowledge of Suite B3. Evidently so.

August 21, 2011
-
Last week, I finished chapters 22 and 23 of my book fairly quickly,
and then I wrote most of Chapter 24 before I ran into a problem.
The "problem" is the massive amount of information that is available
about Ivins' second swabbing and cleaning of areas in Building 1425 on
Monday and Tuesday, April 15 & 16, 2002. There's a lot to
sift through in order to write just a page or so about that particular
attempt by Bruce Ivins to destroy evidence. Among other
documents, there's the
361 page contamination report from USAMRIID.

And there is also the almost
hour by hour timelinethe
Frederick News-Post published of
all the related the events from
April 8 to April 26. Plus, there are the things that are NOT
specifically mentioned but which can be clearly deduced. Some of those
things are VERY
interesting. Examples:

First, Ivins evidently
did the unauthorized cleanup
and
swabbings during the day, on a Monday
and a Tuesday in strict violation of regulations. And, yet,
apparently no one noticed or questioned what he was doing. It wasn't until Ivins told his
boss about what he'd done that people started waking up. So, one
could deduce that the "rule" at USAMRIID was that you could do
just about whatever you wanted as long as you didn't involve a boss and
put the
boss on the spot.

Second,
the
excuse Ivins used for doing the cleanup was a spill that had
occurred in one of
Pat Worsham's labs (B306) while a flask containing "liquid anthrax" was
in a
rotary shaker. The dried material on the outside of the flask was
noticed at around 9 a.m. on April
8. After the spill, the water had evaporated and the spores
had become air-dried and able
to aerosolize. Swabs of
the nostrils of two scientists in the lab seemed to indicate
that had indeed happened. One scientist tested positive.
The flask was taken to a bio-safety cabinet where the material on the
outside was cleaned off using bleach.

Whoa!!!! The implications of that are fascinating! Here is the
entire section about April 8
from the News-Post:

Monday, April 8, 2002:

9 a.m.: Potential exposure
occurs

In a sworn statement, a
USAMRIID
principal investigator said he was working in a laboratory with flasks containing anthrax and
noticed they were leaking.
The investigator reports the potential
exposure to personnel in the suite.

One worker suggests he visit
the
health ward. He and another investigator visit the medical division,
which swabs both individuals' noses and prescribed Ciprofloxacin, an
antibiotic used to prevent bacterial infections.

One
person's nasal swab tests positive for anthrax, but both
individuals had been previously vaccinated against anthrax.

Look at the implications
(which I'll show as headlines to make them
more dramatic):

Headline: USAMRIID MAKES LETHAL
DRIED ANTHRAX SPORES

A USAMRIID scientist noticed a spill from flasks of live "liquid
anthrax."
Some of the liquid had been allowed to air dry.

Headline: AEROSOLIZED SPORES AT
USAMRIID CONTAMINATE SCIENTIST

Some of the
air-dried
anthrax
spores aerosolized and were found in a scientist's nostrils.

Headline: NEARLY ALL USAMRIID SCIENTISTS KNOW HOW TO
DRY SPORES
Allowing "liquid anthrax" to dry is a known
concern to all
USAMRIID scientist working with anthrax.

Headline: USAMRIID SCIENTISTS
KNOW HOW TO DRY ANTHRAX SAFELY

The scientists would not have been as concerned if the spores had been
spilled inside a bio-safety cabinet where there is negative air
pressure and filters catch the spores before the air is released back
into the room. That is demonstrated by the fact that they
took the flask to a bio-safety cabinet to wipe it off and to disinfect
its exterior surface.

Headline: CLAIMS ABOUT IVINS NOT
KNOWING HOW TO DRY SPORES ARE LIES

Since Ivins worked with "liquid anthrax" nearly every day, he was
undoubtedly
more aware of the dangers of allowing the spores to air dry than many
others at USAMRIID. And, he certainly knew it could be done
relatively safely in a biosafety cabinet, since that was one reason
USAMRIID had biosafety
cabinets.

And, too, quantity is not a problem. Pouring a whole flask of
"liquid anthrax" on the floor is NOT less dangerous than spilling a few
drops, just because a few drops will dry faster than a whole
flask. Drying time is not the issue. The issue is the
number of spores that aerosolize. The bigger the spill, the more
spores that can aerosolize. And, if you want to air dry a large
volume of spores faster, you just need to remove most of the water
before starting, and, perhaps, apply dry heat to help the process
along. But, Ivins' friends and co-workers (and
conspiracy theorists) can argue that Ivins didn't know that dry air
will dry things faster than normal air. And, if it can be proved
that he did, they'll find some other argument to show that Ivins'
decades of scientific work left him totally unprepared to do even the
simplest of tasks.

Of course, there is no proof that
the attack spores were air
dried. So, Ivins' supporters will argue that, since the
government mentioned a lyophilizer (because Ivins lied about his knowledge of
lyophilizers), that must be
the way "the government" believes
Ivins dried the spores, and it can be shown that the lyophilizer was
almost certainly NOT used.

I could go on and on about the implications
of the April cleanup without even mentioning the fact that Ivins
cleaned up and tested some areas that were not associated with the
leaking flasks in Patricia Worsham's lab, but which Ivins evidently associated with his secret
preparation and handling of the anthrax in the letters. Those
aspects of the cleanup are what everyone else writes about:
Consciousness of guilt, not implications about knowing how to dry spores

But, I'm an analyst and implications
are my bread and butter. The problem is: When I sit and
thoughtfully munch on my "bread and butter," I'm not writing my book,
and I can get sidetracked into arguments about things that won't even
be mentioned in my book, like how Mother Nature moves concentrations of
anthax spores around from pasture to pasture. I spent a lot of
time last week on that subject. Since it gave me a reason to
confirm my understandings by talking with a scientist I hadn't talked
with in years, it wasn't a total waste of time, but it wasn't
particularly productive, either. The True Believer with whom I
was arguing continues to argue the same nonsense and believes what he
wants to believe.

And, I still need to figure out how much of all this I'll include in
Chapter 24. Groan.

Professor
Guillemin’s overall conclusion is that we may never know the perpetrator of the
anthrax mailings.

It's another statement about what people know versus
what they can deduce
or conclude to be true. Guillemin's writes this on page
xxiii in the Author's Note part of her book:

Although the FBI
officially closed the
anthrax letters case after Ivins
died, the controversy about the crime's implications continues and will
for years, if propelled only by conspiracy
theories.

I did a search for the word "Ivins" in the book, and all the findings
suggest that there is nothing in the book to even remotely suggest that
Jeanne Guillemin believes that someone other than Ivins sent the
anthrax letters. But, because there can never be a trial, and
because there are some unanswered questions (handwriting, methods used,
etc.), there will always be arguments from the True Believers and
conspiracy theorists who think someone else did it.

I look forward to reading the actual book when it comes out. But,
from what I can see by doing on-line searches for words that appear in
the book, I don't think there will be many "stunning
revelations." That seems to be confirmed by the fact that the
True Believer's comments about the book are mostly complaints that
Guillemin didn't examine areas he wants examined or view things the way
he wants them viewed. If Guillemin had any "stunning
revelations," the True Believer would be attacking Guillemin the same
way he endlessly attacked David Willman.

Since I was doing on-line word searches through books available for
sale on Amazon.com, I also looked for the name "Ivins" in Laurie
Garrett's book "I
Heard The Sirens Scream." I found this:

Back in 1981 the Ames strain had been
isolated from infected cattle
in Texas, and then stored at a
lab in Ames, Iowa. The Ames strain subsequently became a
key form of anthrax used all over
the world for vaccine and pathology research. Ivins grew up a batch of Ames anthrax
in his lab at Building 1425 back in 1997, and since then nearly every vaccine test performed on
anthrax at USAMRIID has used his carefully maintained Ames
samples.

Wow! How
many factual errors are there in those few sentences? Ames came
from a single cow, not from "infected cattle." The Ames strain
was never stored at any lab
in Ames, Iowa. The Ames strain was used only in 18 out of many
thousands of labs all over the world, and only in 4 countries.
Most of the Ames spores made in 1997 were made at Dugway. And the
ancestor Ames stock (and derivatives) were still being used for many -
if not most - tests.

And then there's this:

Because the Amerithrax investigation was
closed with the suicide of Bruce Ivins, and doubts remain concerning
the veracity of the FBI's conclusions, we may never know how the the
anthrax culprit(s) reflected after 2001 on their actions, and the
impact that they had on the collective psyche. It remains a distinct possibility,
however, that the same force responsible for the attacks of September
11th also ordered the mailings of Bacillus
anthracis, no doubt
snickering at the response through the same Saudi beard.

Obviously, a lack of fact-checking helped Garrett believe in the
"distinct possibility" of bin Laden's involvement. She also
ignores or is unaware of the fact that bin
Laden denied involvement in
the anthrax
attacks, attacks bin Laden would have ranted
about if they were what Ivins tried to make them appear to be: warnings
of future anthrax attacks.
August 19, 2011
- Uh oh. If I'm not careful, I'm going to get dragged into
nonsensical arguments with a True Believer once again. The
argument is now that the statement by Paul Keim in Wired Magazine, "I
don't know if Ivins sent
the letters" is from a later date than the Paul Keim quote in David
Willman's book: "I think he did
it." So, the True Believer argument is that Paul Keim "obviously"
changed his mind. One thing I'm NOT going to
do is try to grill
Paul Keim about his latest thoughts on the subject as a True Believer
would (and probably has). So, I'm just going leave things the way
they are and move on. As I stated yesterday, the quotes are not contradictory, and they both could be current.

A second
argument is raging over the idea that major river floods spread
anthrax, and people can get anthrax from sniffing sandbags while
building levees. Groan.
Contracting anthrax from sandbags is just plain ridiculous. How spores move
from place to place, however, is a subject I've discussed at
length over the years with top experts. It's a matter of some
dispute among veterinarians and ecology scientists. The general
conclusion is:
"Flooding" will definitely
cause spores to move from place to place, but it's generally rain water
coming down from the sides of hills or high pastures - where an animal
died of anthrax - to lower spots where pools of rain water temporarily
"flood" good pasture land. When the pools dry up, they
leave behind concentrations of spores mixed with the salt from the dead
animal's blood. Cattle love salt, so they'll gobble up the grass
in the infected area and the anthrax spores are consumed along with the
salt.

Generally speaking, big river floods disperse
spores and should prevent enough spores from accumulating in any given
spot to kill cattle. (If big rivers carried spores and
concentrated them, the Mississippi delta should be the most
contaminated
area on the planet.) Moreover, if a spot in Kansas along side the
Missouri River suddenly has cases of anthrax after a flood, that
does not mean the spores came
from the Dakotas. The spores could
have come from some nearby place in the same Kansas field. The
moving water could simply have uncovered a grave where some diseased
animal was
buried many decades ago. An excellent article titled "The
Ecology of Bacillus anthracis"
contains a lot of information on this subject. Here are
a few key paragraphs:

It has been proposed that water may collect and concentrate spores in
‘storage areas’ (Dragon and Renie, 1995). Spores have a high surface hydrophobicity and so
could be carried during a rain runoff in clumps of humus and organic
matter to collect and
concentrate in standing pools or puddles. As they have a high buoyant
density this would result in them and their organic matter clumps remaining
suspended in the standing water to be further concentrated as the water
evaporated. Thus
theoretically ‘storage areas’ may collect more spores from extended
areas to reach increasing spore concentrations over time and be lethally available to
incidental grazing potential hosts.
At the same time there are probably inverse distance factors that could
as well disperse spore-humus clumps in many diverse directions over extended distances,
just as others probably converge and concentrate after a few metres.
The former final dilution
could well be far beyond any possible acquisition of an LD50; the
latter might do the reverse and allow a secondary storage (concentration) site, albeit
smaller than its sources, to be dangerous longer. However there have
been cattle outbreaks in
animals grazing water meadows subject to spring flooding, e.g., Turner
et al., 1999. It will depend on the specific soil topology and character.
Just as rain
will move spores down into the dry soil as it drains and away from
sunlight and U/V light, standing water will have the capacity to move
hydrophobic buoyant spores upwards into the grazed vegetation.

How far moving water can carry concentrations of anthrax spores is
being disputed by experts. There's no reason for me to get
involved in the arguments. So, I'm just going to leave things the
way they are and move on from this, too.

August 18, 2011
- An interesting example of how different people view the same facts
has come up on Dr.
Meryl Nass's forum. Two days ago, I mentioned on this site
that Paul Keim was one of the people who believed Ivins to be
guilty. (I was using page 337
of David Willman's
book "The Mirage Man," where Willman ask Dr. Keim how he would vote "if he were a juror weighing Ivins's guilt
or innocence." Dr. Keim's response was,
"I think he did it.")
To challenge my comment, an Anthrax Truther dug up a quote from a Wire
Magazine article in which Dr. Keim is quoted as saying, "I don't know if Ivins sent the letters," and he
posted it to Nass's site.

Are those two comments contradictory or incompatible? No.
Put together, they have Dr. Keim saying, "I don't know if Ivins sent the letters,"
but "I think he did
it," and that's the way Keim would vote if he was a juror. In
other words, there is no "smoking gun" evidence, but
there is enough circumstantial evidence to convince Keim that Ivins did
it beyond any reasonable doubt. The
Wired magazine article also has a top FBI agent in the investigation,
Edward Montooth,
saying that he wished every question about the case could be answered,
but he is "still convinced Ivins was the mailer."

Everyone would
like to have every question answered before finding someone guilty of
murder, but that is not always
possible. And it's almost never the
situation in jury trials. That's why we have jury
trials, to let 12 citizens decide guilt or innocence based upon the
collected evidence when there is no "smoking gun" conclusively proving guilt.

August 16, 2011
- I'd hoped to get an Anthrax Truther on Dr.
Meryl Nass's forum to answer some questions (see my comment for
August 13), but another Anthrax Truther jumped in to attack me and to
start a different discussion. The fact that they both disagree
with me made me think of a way to describe their reasoning:

Anthrax Truthers #15 through #25 each believe their next door neighbor
sent the anthrax letters.

So, as they see it, it's 25
against 1. Therefore, I must
be wrong if so many people
disagree with me.

In reality, though, none of them agree with any other about who sent
the anthrax letters. So, it's not 25 against 1, it's 1 against
25, twenty-six times.

But, unlike the twenty-five others, I am not alone in
my conclusion that Bruce Ivins sent the anthrax letters. There
are presumably large numbers
of people at the FBI and
DOJ who also believe that Ivins sent the anthrax letters. Plus
the Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel. Plus Paul Keim (per page
337 of David Willman's book), Nancy
Haigwood (who identified him as a possible suspect to the FBI),
probably John Ezzell and Patricia Fellows (who wore a microphone to
tape Ivins), and
many many others. On the other hand, when you find people (like
Ivins' friends, Henry Heine, Gerard Andrews and Russell Byrne) who do not believe the FBI's evidence,
each of those people will almost certainly have their own unique theory about who did do it. So it will be 1
against the world over and over and over and over and over again.

And the only
people with solid evidence to support their conclusions are me and
people at the FBI and DOJ.

August 14, 2011
- I
made very good progress on my new book last week. For nearly
three weeks, because of all the
distractions from "yellow journalism" news stories and arguments with
Anthrax Truthers, I hadn't
written more than a few sentences for the book. But, last week I finished chapters
18, 19, 20 and 21. So, now I've got 168 pages of the first draft
printed out. I think that's going to turn out to be more than
half the book (not including notes and indexes).

But, there are big distractions in the forecast. The GAO
report is due out next month. And in September and October there
will undoubtedly be a many TV specials and news articles
commemorating the 10th anniversary of the anthrax attacks of
2001. Plus, Judge Hurley will probably rule on the motion to
dismiss the Stevens vs USA lawsuit next
week or the week after. That ruling will generate news whichever
way it goes.

When I finish the first draft, the second draft will primarily involve
polishing the writing. Then, if the second draft turns out to be
the
"final draft," I'll have to finish the Notes and Indexes. And,
I'll have
to decide on a title. Then I'll
have
to send copies to the Copyrights office. Somewhere along the
line, I'll have to determine if there's any chance of getting a regular
publisher interested.
That means I'll have to send out queries. Assuming that no
publisher will be
interested (if Laurie Garrett couldn't get a publisher interested in
her book, my chances are even more slim, since I'm just some guy on the
Internet, not a famous reporter), I'll go the route that Laurie Garrett
went with her book,
and I'll self-publish. That means buying software to create the
.pdf files
and working with a printer to
get the book in the right format. (The biggest differences
between the Kindle version and the print version are hyphenating long
words that need to be broken between lines
- you do it for printing but not for Kindle - and the locations of
illustrations. In the paperback version, I can't have an
illustration that's half on one page and half on the next, but on
Kindle there are no actual pages, so illustrations go where they best
help illustrate the text.) I'll probably print only 200 or 300
copies of the paperback, and I'll release
the book on Kindle at the same time as the paperback goes on sale at
Amazon.com.
So far, the book is looking very good to me, but I'm not exactly
an impartial reviewer. Unlike David Willman's recent book - and
unlike any other book on the subject - my book will examine and explain
the
case largely in chronological order. In some ways, that makes it
read very
much
like a thriller. Although the ending is known, it's still a cat
and mouse game as Ivins tries to mislead the investigation and tries to
keep from getting caught. There are tense periods, then quiet
periods as it appears that he's gotten away with it, then things get
tense again.

The writing process has required that I read through nearly every news
story again,
looking for forgotten details and what people were thinking at each
moment in time, day by day, week by week, month by month. Chapter
21, which I finished on Friday, is about the discovery that the Ames
strain came from Texas and not from the USDA in Iowa, which Ivins
absolutely refused to believe, since his plan depended upon the Ames strain
being a common and untraceable strain. And, during that same time
period, on January 10, 2002, Terry Abshire sent Bruce Ivins two
photographs she'd taken, one showing a normal growth from the "Ames
ancestor" sample obtained by USAMRIID in 1981, and a second photograph
of morphs that formed as colony materials were transferred from plate
to plate and allowed to grow for 42 hours. She wanted Ivins'
thoughts on the morphs, since Ivins was a top expert on growing anthrax.

Significantly, Ivins didn't seem to find anything of interest in the
morphs. He mistakenly believed his techniques virtually prevented
morphs
from
forming. But he clearly thought Abshire's photos could be useful
in his
on-going attempts to mislead the investigation. On January 23,
Ivins took
the two photos to an
FBI agent/scientist who was then working at USAMRIID, and he told the
agent that
the first picture looked just
like what he'd seen in growths made from the attack spores. And,
he pointed the finger at former USAMRIID scientist Gregory Knudson as
being a likely suspect in
the case. Plus, since Terry Abshire had a sample of the "ancestor
Ames," Ivins also pointed the finger at Abshire's boss, John Ezzell, as
a possible suspect. According to Ivins, both Knudson and Ezzell
had the necessary knowledge and the type of character to be the anthrax
mailer.

While Ivins was clearly trying to mislead the investigation by pointing
at
people he knew weren't responsible for the anthrax mailings, he was
almost certainly also fishing for information. But, the FBI
agent/scientist wasn't of much help. The agent wouldn't even
accept the photos from Ivins, telling him instead to hold onto the
photos until he was officially asked for them by an investigating
agent. The significance of the morphs appears to have been
totally missed by Ivins at that time, but within the next month he'd
start to pick
up clues as to what the morphs seemed to mean to investigators.
And that would require Ivins to take some drastic actions that would
later be used as evidence against him.

And, while all this was going on, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and her
fellow conspiracy theorists were campaigning to get the FBI to arrest
Steven Hatfill for the crime - or to at least publicly investigate
him. That effort must have provided some comfort to Ivins, since
it meant others were also
pointing the FBI away from the real killer.

I hope the book will turn out to be as interesting to read as it is
interesting to write.

August 13, 2011
- For the past week or so, I've been exploring the beliefs of an
Anthrax Truther who calls himself "AnthraxSleuth." He doesn't
trust the government, of course, but he
recently advised me that he also feels that the media is controlled
by the government, and that's why they won't pay any attention to his
"evidence." And, no one else seems to believe him, either, not
even other Anthrax
Truthers. So, I've asked him,

In all the years you've
been posting to forums, have you made any progress at all in converting
people to accept your theory?

If he feels he has made progress, I'll ask him to describe what
progress he's made. If he says he hasn't made any progress, I'll
try to get him to speculate on why
he hasn't made any progress.

Somewhere I recall reading about a term that can be applied to a person
who does the same thing over and over and over, expecting different
results each time, but always getting the same result. I'm sure
the term isn't "Anthrax Truther." It's something else. If I
can't remember, I'll have to do some research to find the term.

August
12, 2011
- Dina
Temple-Raston reviewed David Willman's book "The Mirage Man" in
yesterday's Washington Post. But, it's not really a review.
It's more about Temple-Raston's view of the case, and it opens with her
talking with members of Ivins' family. Although Temple-Raston
doesn't seem to dispute in any way that Ivins was the culprit, she
feels the FBI's "circumstantial evidence and innuendo" showing that
Bruce Ivins was the anthrax mailer was "ultimately unsatisfying."
Of course, she spends a lot of time writing about "evidence" in the
Hatfill "investigation"without ever mentioning the conspiracy theorist lynch mob campaign
that made Hatfill a suspect in the minds of the American
public. When discussing Ivins, she focuses mostly on his mental
problems and how his friends and family don't believe he did it.
And she concludes with two paragraphs about the Stevens
vs USA lawsuit,
where a single sentence mistake in a legal filing caused idiotic
headlines. I
found Dina Temple-Raston's review to be "ultimately unsatisfying."

A True
Believer who appears to believe that Muslims were behind the
anthrax attacks,
however, found Temple-Raston's review to contain "lies" about
"imagined" events:

The Post’s critically
important article dealt with an imagined
earlier poisoning plot by Dr. Ivins — based on the anonymous witness
who then in 2009 book described her psychotic delusions.

Today we are now hearing the lies repeated in a review in the
Washington Post review of a book by David Willman, MIRAGE MAN.

The True Believer
evidently merely believes the
statements were imagined lies. In reality, they were confirmed by three psychiatrists
who questioned Ivins about his plan to poison a "young woman" in July
of 2000, over a year before the anthrax attacks: Dr. Orrin Palmer, Dr.
David Irwin and Dr. Allen Levy. (The psychiatrists' confirming
discussions with Ivins are mentioned on pages 65 and 66 of Willman's
book.) The only difference is that the
psychiatrists didn't take Ivins' plans quite as seriously as the
experienced therapist to whom Ivins originally stated those
plans. However, they
voiced no objection when the therapist
called the police to tell them about Ivins. (According to one
source, Ivins' counselor was an ordained interfaith minister, she
earned her master’s degree in pastoral
counseling from Loyola College
and a doctorate in religious studies from Stratford University.
She spent 25 years as a pastor and mental health counselor.)
The True Believer also reminds us that the General Accountability
Office (GAO) is scheduled to release a review of the FBI's Amerithrax
investigation next month. Plus, he appears to be really hyped up about wanting to
make certain that
the "imagined lies" get corrected:

The Washington Post
should correct its reporting on such a critical issue.

and

This is not merely a
journalistic issue — Amerithrax is a
national security issue and missteps in analysis need to be corrected.

and

The report filed in the
United States District Court by Dr. Saathoff should be corrected and all
reliance on the first counselor should
be removed.

Washington Post should correct its reporting on such a
critical issue.

One wonders what this True
Believer believes will happen if these items are not "corrected" to suit his
beliefs. After all, the chances of The Washington Post or the
Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel changing what they wrote are about zero,
and the chances that the GAO's report will agree with the True Believer
are probably around zero as
well.

August 11, 2011 (B)
- I checked the Stevens vs USA lawsuit docket
this morning and found two new entries were made yesterday. But,
they were only an "unopposed" motion for an extension of time to depose
witnesses, filed by Stevens, and a motion by the government opposing the "unopposed"
motion. Yawn. Stevens' lawyers need additional time to
depose the government's expert witnesses Dr. Shaw and Dr. Chefetz, plus
they haven't yet deposed Dr. Stephens, Dr. Colwell or Dr. Hawley.
I can't be certain who any of these "expert witnesses" are, nor in
which fields they are "experts," but research on the names indicates
Shaw and Chefetz are probably psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, the
others are probably microbiologists. The
government's response is a complaint that they didn't agree to an
extention to September 30, only to September 23. Yawn. I'd
hoped that the Judge had ruled on the motion to dismiss and the motion
for a Summary Judgment, but that hasn't happened yet.

August 11, 2011 (A)
- This morning, there are couple new - but minor - tidbits of
information about the inhalation anthrax case in Minnesota. CIDRAP
reports:

[Minnesota State
Epidemiologist Dr. Ruth] Lynfield declined to describe the patient's
condition today. "There was a
rumor that the patient had died—that's just a rumor," she said.
She noted that the patient's family has had bad
experiences with the news media in the pastand has
asked the MDH to protect its privacy.

Hmm. "Bad experiences with the media in the past." There's
a name that comes to mind, but I have no desire to invade anyone's
privacy, either. And the pieces don't quite fit.

August 9-10, 2011
- According to the
Alexandria,
Minnesota Echo Press, an apparently "natural" case of inhalation
anthrax is being investigated by the Minnesota Department of Health
consulting with the CDC.

"All evidence points to
this case of anthrax being caused by exposure to naturally occurring
anthrax in the environment," said Minnesota State Epidemiologist Ruth
Lynfield. The individual had exposure to soil and animal remains. Cases
of anthrax in hooved animals occur yearly in parts of the country
including the Midwest and West as far south as Texas, and up to the
Canadian border.

The individual is not a
Minnesota resident according to MPH officials, and has recently
traveled to several Western states including North Dakota, Montana,
Wyoming, and South Dakota. No information has been disclosed
regarding the patient's name, age, gender, or medical condition.

However:

A source at CIDRAP [Center
for Infectious Disease Research & Policy] who asked to remain
anonymous, confirmed that the
patient is male.

This Minnesota case seems
rather bizarre. What did this womanactually
do to be in “exposed to soil” – walk across the
ground? What about “exposed to animal remains” – buy some ground beef
at the grocery store?

Any case of inhalational
anthrax will trigger a major security alert – this one seems to being
downplayed – much like Bob Stevens “the avid outdoorsman who drank from
a stream”.

After all, if this man
caught inhalation anthrax from natural sources, that means:

1.
You don't need to weaponize
spores with silicon to
make them float
in the air.

2. You don't need a
Speed-Vac or lyophilizer to dry anthrax spores.

3. Nature can create
particles small enough to cause inhalation anthrax.4. Spores are not
firmly and naturally bound together by van der Waals forces.5. You do not need a
supersophisticated lab to make floatable anthrax spores.

And, if Nature can make enough spores to give someone inhalation
anthrax without any specialized equipment, then an experienced
microbiologist like Bruce Ivins should be able to do at least as well
with an entire lab at his disposal.August 7, 2011
- Last
week was a very busy week,
mostly because I let myself get dragged into arguments with a True
Believer. That's always
frustrating and usually a waste of time.
He's finally stopped filling my inbox with complaints and opinions, and
he's back
to endlessly posting to Lew
Weinstein's site.

The problem with arguing with True Believers is, of course, that they
work with beliefs, not facts. So, they show you obscure and
irrelevant things that they believe
somehow support their beliefs, and they get upset that you cannot see
what they see. And, they get doubly upset because they cannot
explain things. Explanations would require that they
describe their own beliefs and interpretations in detail, and why they
believe what they believe, which would make those beliefs
and
interpretations open to examination and discussion. Their beliefs are not open to discussion.

When they're not posting endless quotes and articles that they believe
are somehow related to their beliefs, mostly what they do is point out
things they cannot accept or believe
in other people's theories
and
hypotheses about the anthrax attacks of 2001. They don't want to
leave the door open for similar criticisms of their theories or
beliefs, so, they have absolutely nothing constructive to say.

The arguments weren't a total
waste of time, however. Sometimes True Believers and conspiracy
theorists do bring up new
items of information and new topics for discussion. Last week, I
did learn a few things about Speed-Vacs
and lyophilization (from my research, not
from the True
Believer). Amusingly, I also learned that some people consider my
Camaro to be a truck because I can fold down the
back seat and transport things in it like
with a truck. And I learned that the word "lyonnaise"
means to "prepare with onions." Any day you learn something isn't
a totally wasted day.

Evidently, I'm an eternal optimist. I keep thinking that if I
could
just get an intelligent conversation going with a True Believer or a
conspiracy theorist, we might both
benefit from it. But, it's
becoming very clear that there is absolutely no way to have an
intelligent conversation with either a True Believer or a conspiracy
theorist. They just won't allow it to happen. Their mindset won't let them think
rationally. They are too impatient to work things out logically. And they are just too angry and
upset over the fact that the entire world isn't accepting their beliefs.

On that same vein, while I was doing my regular work out at the health
club on Friday,
an elderly
Tea Party member was on a tread mill about 15 feet away. I
can't say I've never seen
anyone so angry, since I've seen some pretty
angry people recently, but he was ranting at the news on TV about the
way he'd handle racial problems and what he thought of people
who compare Tea Party members to terrorists, as was done several
times recently. Tea Party members seem to be
driven by anger and hatred. I've never seen one who wasn't
furiously angry over something. Someone needs to tell them that
anger and logical thinking are almost opposite functions. They
need to understand that, if you elect
someone who is furiously angry, you are electing someone who cannot be
reasonable and who will not think intelligently or
logically. Unfortunately, that seems to be what
"Teabaggers"
want.

I could discuss the Tottingham
riots, or the fact that the #1 movie in the
country today is about the downfall of the human race and their
replacement with angry apes as the dominant species on planet
Earth. "Apes alone weak. Apes together
strong." -- Caesar
(Andy Serkis). But, I think I'd better move on.
Last week, someone sent me an email about a
fire at a waste treatment plant in Harlem, where steel beams were
twisted and softened, even though they were somewhat
fire-protected. The emailer thought I might be able to use it to
argue with 9/11 conspiracy theorists who do not believe that the fires
in the World Trade Center could have softened or twisted steel
beams. However, I very rarely debate with 9/11 Truthers. I
try to
limit my debates to Anthrax Truthers.

Someone who read an
earlier version of this comment advised me that Rosie
O'Donnell is a 9/11 Truther. That figures.
One O'Donnell belief: “I do believe that it’s the first time in history
that fire
has ever melted steel."
This morning, someone sent me an email about codes that were apparently found in the
Norway killer's manifesto. Back in April, I got involved in
trying to decipher "The Mysterious Rick
McCormick Code." I don't want to get side-tracked into that
sort of thing again. I want to stay focused on the anthrax
attacks of 2001. Besides, the Norway killer's codes seem to be
related to
European matters, so it's best for me to leave the decoding to
Europeans.

Lately, I've been thinking about setting up a new web site at
www.ed-lake.com
where I can discuss things that do not relate to the anthrax attacks of
2001. (I've owned the domain name for years.) For example,
I saw "Captain
America" in 3D the other day, and kept wanting to comment on it
somewhere. It was the first 3D movie I'd seen in over 50
years, and I couldn't detect any visible
advances in the technology. But,
I need to finish my book first. I'm wasting
too much time already.

Yesterday, I checked the Docket for the Stevens
vs USA
lawsuit, and there haven't been any new entries since
August 2. That would seem to confirm that the next entry will
very likely be Judge Hurley's ruling on the government's motions to
dismiss.

Also, the Russians are back. They apparently found an IP address
to use
that I wasn't blocking, and yesterday they started accessing my site
endlessly in groups of 15 accesses about a second apart, with the
groups being about a half hour apart. They hadn't been
doing that for over a month.

As soon as I block an IP address, they stop using it. I've got
about 2,883,584 IP
addresses blocked. And they found one I hadn't
blocked. Who has access to so
many IP addresses? The only pattern I see in the numerous
web sites
they use is that it could have something to do with on-line
gaming. But, why are they so persistent with my anthrax
site? They don't do it to my other site (knock
wood!). And, I'm unaware of any other site having the same
"problem." (I think the first time I mentioned this problem was
in my November 18, 2010
comment.)

Yesterday, probably because I had Russians on my mind, I rented a movie
titled "Exporting
Raymond," which is a funny documentary about reworking the hit
American TV series
"Everybody Loves Raymond" into a Russian TV series. The DVD also
contains two episodes of "Everybody Loves Raymond" and the same
episodes of "Everybody Loves Kostya," which is the #1 TV show in
Russia. The documentary is mostly about how
difficult it is to communicate humor to another person, and
particularly to someone in another country who speaks another language
and has a different view of life in general. Explaining humor can
be hilariously frustrating.

I guess the point of all this is that it sometimes seems to be a
miracle that people are able to communicate at all, given all the
individual perspectives involved, the individual interpretations and
beliefs. And cooperation
between humans can seem to be a double miracle. It seems so rare
that, whenever an example is found, it should be worth writing about.

But, convincing a True Believer that he's wrong? Eric Hoffer said
it isn't even possible. He said the best you can do is try to
convert
the True Believer to a different belief. But, I've got far too
many
other
things I need to do first.

August 5, 2011 (C)
-There were four more emails from the Anthrax Truther in my inbox when
I came back from my regular workout at the health club this
afternoon. That's a total of eleven
emails for today - so far. And he's now also posting
things to Lew Weinstein's web site about the discussion. He
posted:

Ed doesn’t know what
happened to the large amount of spores made by Dr. Ivins’ assistants
Pat and Mara that is missing.

and

Ed has no answer to the
question: where is the large amount of Ames made by Dr. Ivins
assistants that is missing? He simply is not acquainted with the most
basic facts of the case such as this large amount of missing virulent
Ames.

Notice that he doesn't have any answers to these questions,
either. They're just mysteries. And mysteries
obviously imply something to
him, but he won't say what they imply. In one of his afternoon
emails, he asked:

Ed, where is the large amount of Ames made by Dr. Ivins assistants that is missing? They report it was made for the purpose of putting into RMR 1029.

This morning's claim: On some unspecified
date, Ivins supplied "virulent Ames" to a former Zawahiri
associate.

This afternoon's claim: A large amount of "Ames" made by Ivins'
assistants went missing.

So what? He won't say. I recall some record somewhere
which has Ivins saying that nothing
was ever added to flask RMR-1029 after it was created in 1997.
Ivins' assistants thought
they were making spores to add to the flask, but they didn't know what
actually happened to the spores. Does this point to anyone other than
Ivins? It doesn't appear so. I also recall making
some comment on some forum to the effect that Ivins could have just
been giving his associates some "make work" to keep them busy or give
them practice, so he wouldn't risk losing them because they had nothing
to do.

But that was just speculation on my part. What is the Anthrax
Truther speculating? He won't say. Because, if he does,
we'll learn what he actually believes -- and he known the facts won't
support him. What happened to the spores Ivins' associates
made? I don't know. And neither does the Anthrax
Truther. The facts say those spores could not have gone into the anthrax
letters, because they weren't likely grown from spores taken from flask
RMR-1029, and if they were made with normal lab processes, they
wouldn't have had the "silicon signature" found in the attack anthrax.

The affidavits allege that,
not only did Dr. Ivins create and maintain the spore batch used in the
mailings, but he also had access to and experience using a lyophilizer.
A lyophilizer is a sophisticated machine that is used to dry pathogens,
and can be used to dry anthrax. We know others in Dr. Ivins’ lab
consulted him when they needed to use this machine.

It doesn't say that Ivins used a lyophilizer to create the
spores. It just says Ivins knew how to use one. But,
no Anthrax Truther will ever agree that that's what was said. Nor
would any Anthrax Truther ever agree that it was a misstatement if that
was what was said or meant.

This is becoming as tedious for me as it probably is for the readers of
this web site. I'm going to really really try to avoid any more
discussions about the emails I'm getting from this particular Anthrax
Truther.

August 5, 2011 (B) -
Hmm. The Anthrax Truther didn't like my version of his
theory. He says his "claim" or theory is:

The claim is that Dr. Bruce
Ivins, in the course of his formally
assigned duties, supplied virulent
Ames to a former Zawahiri associate,
[redacted].

[Redacted] was not a
citizen and Dr. Ivins did not know that when he arrived to work
alongside Bruce, Pat and Mara at the B3.

There was no USAMRIID
employee who was an "al Qaeda agent." The former Zawahiri
associate was not a USAMRIID employee.

Nor was he an "al Qaeda
agent." He is a former Zawahiri associate.

So, the Anthrax Truther's
claim/theory is apparently
that Bruce Ivins gave "virulent Ames" to "a former Zawahiri
associate." It's a meaningless claim, of course, because
"virulent Ames" is not the same as Ames from flask RMR-1029, and the
facts say that the attack anthrax originated with flask RMR-1029.
So, the fact that Ivins supplied "virulent Ames" to a former Zawahiri
associate at some point in time is just more irrelevant information. The
Anthrax Truther is evidently assuming
some kind of connection where there is no proven connection of any kind.

And, he just called me a "moron" for my interpretation of his
theory/claim. And, he's filling my inbox with a stream of emails
telling me how I should do things the way he does things, because his
way gets the results that confirm his beliefs. My methods do not
confirm his beliefs. My methods just help me to understand things
and (hopefully) provide enjoyable and informative reading for people
who visit this site. (To Anthrax Truthers, of course, anything
that does NOT confirm their beliefs is also NOT informative. It's
simply wrong.)

August 5, 2011 (A)
- The same Anthrax Truther I mentioned yesterday sent me an email
overnight that is probably worth mentioning. It could be
informative. The email discusses two subjects. First, he
found this information in an email he received from a well-known
scientist with whom we have both communicated from time to time:

(1) A SpeedVac, when coupled to
a dry ice trap or condenser (the
configuration most frequently encountered in biomedical research labs),functions as a
lyophilizer. (In many, if not most, cases in which
post-1980s biomedical research papers state that a sample was
“lyophilized,”
the papers refer to use of a SpeedVac.)

In short:

(1) SpeedVac = lyophilizer.

The Anthrax Truther
evidently consulted with the scientist in order to contradict what Melanie Ulrich said
in the August
8, 2008 article the Anthrax Truther used to start his
discussion/argument about SpeedVacs. As you can see, the
scientist stated that a SpeedVac can be made to function like a
lyophilizer, ergo: a SpeedVac is a
lyophilizer.
So, by their logic, my Camaro is
a truck because I can fold down the back seat and use it like a truck to haul things.

The Anthrax Truther's
point is that I should do as he does. He believes a SpeedVac is a lyophilizer, so he consulted
with scientists until he found one who would say something that
seemingly confirms the Truther's belief. The Truther feels I am wrong in trying to understand
things, in trying think for
myself, and in trying figure things out for myself.

What he got was an opinion from
one scientist which seemingly contradicts a statement from another
scientist (Ulrich), and the fact that the Anthrax Truther got an opinion he
likes puts an end to all controversy, as far as he's concerned.

To me, it's all just babble. Does the fact that a SpeedVac can be
made to function like a
lyophilizer mean that it is a
lyophilizer? No!
A SpeedVac does not ordinarily
freeze dry (lyophilize). But, so
what??? Who cares??? What
does it have to do with the anthrax attacks of 2001 or Bruce Ivins or
anything else?
The second part of the Anthrax Truther's email contains the same
scientist's
thoughts on how much material can be dried in a SpeedVac and how long
it takes.

(2) 1-4 g of wet bacterial
cells or spores occupies a volume less than 5
ml.
(A 1 liter culture presumably
would be required to produce 1-4 g of driedbacterial cells or
spores...but more than 99.5% of the 1 liter starting
volume first would be removed, in seconds to minutes, by decanting,
centrifugation, or filtration, leaving less than 0.5% of the 1 liter
starting volume to be dried.)

(2) If it would take 1 h to process a 1 ml sample, then it would take 1
h to
five 1 ml samples (since a SpeedVac, as most frequently
configured, holds,
and simultaneously processes, up to 1 ml samples), and thus it would take 1h to dry sufficient
spore paste to yield 1-4 g of dried spores.

Okay, here we have a well-known scientist stating that a 1-liter culture can produce enough spores
for all the letters.
In my August 3 (C) comment I cited the DOJ as stating:

21.
The anthrax attacker would have
cultivated at least “2.8 to 53
liters of liquidmedium to produce the
spores required for the letters."

And, if you recall from my May 23, 2010 comment, Bruce Ivins' friend
Henry Heine said the largest number
of
spores Ivins could create in one run of four or five flasks was 10
billion
spores. "10 followed by nine zeroes." So, it would have
taken him a year and
countless cultures to create
the spores in the letters. And, Bruce Ivins himself stated in
numerous documents that he and his
staff were routinely making 433
billion
spores per run.

So, we have 4 sets of
figures from 4 sources, and none seem agree. But other scientists
I've talked with agree that the 1 and 2.8 liter figures are
very reasonable. And, all these other scientists agree that there is no scientific reason to claim
that Ivins could not have made the spores in the letters.
But, I'm getting off the subject. The subject - like it or not - is
SpeedVacs vs.
lyophilizers.

The Anthrax Truther doesn't seem to be trying to argue that Bruce Ivins
used a SpeedVac/lyophilizer to make the anthrax powders in the
letters. He believes that al Qaeda sent the anthrax letters, or
possibly al Qaeda undercover agents (other than Ivins) working at
USAMRIID. He seems to believe that any USAMRIID employee who ever
talked with a
Muslim could be an undercover al Qaeda agent or under the spell of some
al Qaeda agent.

The point I endlessly tried to make with him years ago when we were
actually debating on forums is that his arguments appear to be about irrelevant matters. What
does any of this discussion about SpeedVacs and lyophilizers have to do
proving anything
about the anthrax attacks of 2001?

The facts still say that Bruce Ivins most
likely air dried
the anthrax spores in the letters. The powder in media
letters provides the best evidence. It was a non-homogenous
powder that appeared to have been centrifuged to get rid of excess
water, and then the moist pellet was allowed to air dry inside a
biosafety cabinet, possibly with heat applied to speed up drying.
The dry pellet was then crushed or chopped up with a razor blade and
the results were put into a letter. The process was likely
repeated five times for the five letters.

Could Ivins have done it in a SpeedVac? Ulrich says no.
Another scientist seems to be saying yes. I don't think Ivins
would have made the media powders using a SpeedVac because he was
trying to make a powder that would look like it was made by Muslim
terrorists in a garage or a cave. It was supposed to look crude.
You do not use a sophisticated
piece of equipment like a SpeedVac to make a crude powder
if there are unsophisticated
ways to do the same thing.

And, while the powder in the senate letters was more sophisticated, it
still seems unlikely that Ivins would have used a SpeedVac if he didn't
have to use a
SpeedVac. The fewer pieces of equipment he used, the less likely
he'd leave some kind of "signature" that could be traced back to his
lab.

I'm not saying that the Anthrax Truther's scientist is
wrong. I'm saying that his scientist friend was just looking at
the science and not at other factors, like what Ivins was trying to do
when he produced the powder -- and why.

And, arguing that Ivins could have
used a SpeedVac to create the anthrax powders doesn't mean that was the
most likely way he
would have done it. The most likely
way is the way that takes into account everything known about Ivins: his
motivation, his scientific abilities, his experience, his psychology,
his penchant for taking risks, and everything else.

August 4, 2011 (B)
- I just received an email from an Anthrax Truther which he seems to
think explains something about Speed-Vacs and lyophilizers. The
email says only this:

Ed, this expert provides
direct authority for your general argument, based on personal knowledge
of the particular Speed Vac at issue - she was Bruce's lab assistant

Ivins' alleged use of a lyophilizer to
make powdered anthrax. Ulrich said Ivins signed out a SpeedVac, but not
a lyophilizer, which is too large to fit in a containment hood, or
secure protective area.

She said it would take about
an hour to dry one milliliter of wet anthrax spores in one vial in a
SpeedVac. It would have been impossible for Ivins to have dried more
than a liter, which would have been required for the amount of anthrax
sent in the letters, in the time frame they were mailed, Ulrich said.

What does this
explain? That in 2008 some people believed Ivins might have used a lyophilizer or a
Speed-Vac to dry the spores and some people didn't? So
what?

The reason I'm posting the Anthrax Truther's emails here is because a
long time ago I swore off responding to him directly. If I do,
he'll just send me dozens more emails. (I once had to set up
software to block his emails because he'll send me hundreds if he's in the
mood.) Plus, posting a few of his emails here can be informative
and helpful. I think it's informative to show the reasoning (or
lack of reasoning) of an Anthrax Truther who is also a True Believer.

While I was writing the above comment, he sent me another email:

now that you've
persuasively demolished the suggestion he used a Speed-Vac (supported
by expert Melanie Ulrich), you may want to explain he how he air dried
the anthrax (what's involved etc.)

Answer: We don't know exactly
how he dried the anthrax. Ivins knew several ways of drying
spores. But, as I stated in my July 20 comment, he most likelyair dried the powders inside one
or more biosafety cabinets while he was in his lab alone in the
evenings. Air drying spores is
about as complicated as turning mud into dust. Doing it in
biosafety cabinets eliminates most dangers. Adding heat speeds up
the process. And, Ivins had very
likely been air drying spores so for a long time,
perhaps as long as a year. There are indications that he first
conceived of the idea of an anthrax letter as far back as early
2000. But, I've explained all this here before, so I won't bother
going into further details. The Anthrax Truther can just do a
search back through my comments to find all the details he wants.
I'm going to try to stop responding to him via these comments,
too. They might be informative and helpful to readers of this
site, but I don't want to encourage him to start arguing this
way. The only logical (if only mildy effective) way to deal with aggressive Anthrax
Truthers and True Believers is to ignore them.

August 4, 2011 (A)
- I must have been tired and worn out yesterday afternoon when I
commented on this sentence from Bruce Ivins' patent #6387665:

The concentrated sample was
desalted again using the same buffer, frozen and finally lyophilized using a Speed-Vac.

I failed to notice the word "frozen" was used in the sentence.
Now I see that the sample was apparently already frozen when it went into the Speed-Vac. So,
that's further evidence that the sample was NOT freeze-dried (a.k.a.
lyophilized) using a Speed-Vac. The Speed-Vac applied heat and created a vacuum to thaw and dry the sample.

It's difficult to decipher the incoherent emails I received
overnight. They seem to be insisting that a lyophilizer is the same as a Speed-Vac and that the
government stated that Ivins
used a lyophilizer/Speed-Vac to dry the attack spores. It's
total nonsense, of course, but the problem with dealing with Anthrax
Truthers is that they never explain
their beliefs, they just declare
their beliefs. And they get really
upset if you do not accept their declared beliefs.August 3, 2011 (E)
- At this rate, I'm never
going to get back to work on my book! An Anthrax Truther
who doesn't like being called an "Anthrax Truther" or a "True Believer"
just brought to my attention a patent filed in 2000 which included
Bruce Ivins as a co-inventor. It's a "method of making
a vaccine for anthrax." The Anthrax Truther brought it to my
attention because in the patent it says,

The concentrated sample was
desalted again using the same buffer, frozen and finally lyophilized using a Speed-Vac.

The Anthrax Truther complained that I didn't know that "a speed vac is
used for lyophilization."

He was confused and assumed I was also confused. In reality, the
Anthrax Truther was the only person confused by the term "lyophization"
in that patent. He gets upset when I try to explain things,
but he's now apparently asking me to explain things to him so that he
can complain that I looked things up instead of asking busy experts.

My big Webster's
Encyclopedic Dictionary contains
only three words that begin with "lyo." The first is "lyonnaise,"
which in
French cooking means to prepare with onions. The two other
definitions
are:

lyophilic; Chem., denoting a
colloid which cannot be readily precipatated because of a strong
affinity for the dispersion medium.lyophilization; Biochem., the process of drying by freezing biological
materials in a vacuum.

Here's what it says about lyophilizers and Speed-Vacs on page 30 of the
FBI Summary Report on the Amerithrax Case:

Drying
anthrax spores requires either a
sophisticated drying machine called a lyophilizer, a speed-vac, or a
great deal of time and space to let the spores air-dry – that is, to
allow the water to evaporate – in the lab.

As I understand it, the primary difference between a Speed-Vac and a
lyophilizer is that one applies heat
and the other is cold
during the drying
process. According to one
source, "Speedvacs concentrate and dry samples by applying vacuum, heat,
and centrifugal force to the samples." I can't find any source
which
mentions freezing in a Speed Vac (although there may be attachments to
apply cold to samples). Every
source I see says that heat
is applied
to help dry the material. That is a BIG difference between
a Speed Vac and a lyophilizer. Other major differences are the size of the
device and the size of the material sample you can dry in the machine.
A Speed Vac is typically a machine small enough to fit on a desk.
It is
used to dry very tiny amounts
of material via a vacuum and applied heat. (Water evaporates away
with the air as the device applies heat
and creates a vacuum.) Here's a picture of one type of Speed Vac:

The device seems to be used mainly for drying very tiny amounts of DNA
or RNA material. It probably wasn't used by Ivins to make
the attack anthrax, because it would take too many drying runs to
create the amount of material in the senate letters, and it probably
couldn't have produced the dried material in the media letters because
the clumps were too big to get from such a machine.

The lyophilizer at USAMRIID was described as being the size of a
refrigerator, so it probably looked something like this one:

Just like a Speed Vac, a lyophilizer also dries materials by creating a
vacuum. But, it is often called a "freeze dryer" because
the cold of a vacuum is part of the drying process. It can
obviously dry much larger quantities of material.

"Lyophilizer" and "freeze dryer" are synonymous. No one
calls a Speed Vac a freeze dryer.

In summary, the
patent document filed by Bruce Ivins and others seems to use the term
"lyophilized" to mean drying by
application of a vacuum. It may be bad terminology
to say lyophilized
using a Speed-Vac because a
Speed-Vac doesn't freeze dry, but I'm no expert. So, if anyone
has any further information, I'd like to see it. (I enjoy
and appreciate
getting information from experts, I just don't like bugging them for
information I can usually look up for myself.)

August 3, 2011 (D)
- I just received an email from an Anthrax Truther who had this to say
about my (B) comment today regarding the Stevens v USA lawsuit:

Ed,
you shouldn't be commenting on legal
matters because you are embarrassing yourself

He was referring to the fact that I didn't know if Judge Hurley could
rule without hearing from the Stevens' side of the case. He
wouldn't provide any information to answer that question, of
course. He just felt I shouldn't be trying to explain the law
when I'm not a lawyer. But, as I wrote on July 24, I'm
"learning law by arguing law." I state that I'm not a lawyer, but
I try to decipher the legal documents in layman's language for my
comments. And, as it says at the top of this site, if you see any
errors on this site, please let me know.

As I mentioned in my (B) comment today, "Unlike the Anthrax Truther blogs where it
seems that they only ask
meaningless questions and never really look for any answers, this web
site attempts to clarify
issues."

It appears that Anthrax Truthers do not want anyone to even try to clarify anything, because
the more confusion they can create, the more likely they'll be able to
trick someone into believing as they believe.August 3, 2011 (C)
- Hmm. I don't want to cause any more delays in getting a ruling
from Judge Hurley, and this will not likely create such a delay, but I
think I see another error in
the revised filing in the Stevens v USA lawsuit. This item is at
the bottom of page 5 in the Government's
Statement of Facts:

22.
By way of comparison, the smallest
possible estimate of liquid solution used toprepare the anthrax
letters was at least three to seven times larger than the liquid
contents ofRMR-1029, which never
contained more than one liter of liquid, and contained less than 400milliliters on October 4,
2011.

Flask RMR-1029 contained highly-concentrated
anthrax spores at 30 billion spores per milliliter. If there were
400
milliliters left on October 4, 2001, there would have been 400x30
billion
spores left, or 12 trillion spores,
about 4 times the amount used in all the anthrax letters
combined. The goverment lawyers clearly aren't scientists, and in
an attempt to be illustrative, they compared the highly concentrated spores in flask
RMR-1029 to the non-concentrated
spores in a typical flask of growth material. Oops.

Hmmm again. I just noticed that the Statement of Facts says
"less than 400 milliliters on October 4, 2011." Technically, that
part of the statement is not exactly incorrect, since October 4, 2011
hasn't yet come to pass, and there were 21 milliliters left on November
28, 2003. So, when October 4, 2011 rolls around, if the 21
milliliters are still in Flask RMR-1029, that will still be less than
400 milliliters. But, they almost certainly meant October 4, 2001, not 2011. Another error.

On October 4, 2001, there
were 359 milliliters left in flask RMR-1029, which is less than 400
milliliters, and that would be 10 trillion 770 billion spores, or about
three times the
amount of spores used in all the letters combined.

I probably erred in showing item #22 from the Statement of Facts
without also showing #21. The two together are:

21.
The anthrax attacker would have
cultivated at least “2.8 to 53 liters of liquidmedium to produce the
spores required for the letters.” Id., p. 77. If the attacker used Petridishes instead, he would
have needed 463 to 1250 plates to grow enough anthrax.

22.
By way of comparison, the smallest
possible estimate of liquid solution used toprepare the anthrax
letters was at least three to seven times larger than the liquid
contents ofRMR-1029, which never
contained more than one liter of liquid, and contained less than 400milliliters on October 4,
2011.

2.8 liters is 7 times 400 milliliters. That's where they got the
"seven times" figure from. I don't know where the "three" times
figure comes from, but it probably comes from calculating the number of
plates, even though plates don't involve "liquid contents." I'm
just going to ignore the plates data -- to avoid getting a
headache.

According to the Roundtable
Discussion of August 18, 2008, the contents of Flask RMR-1029 were
concentrated down from "164 liters of spore production." So, applying all the corrections and leaving
out the plates data, item #22 in the Government's Statement of Facts
would read (with the changes in red):

22.
By way of comparison, the smallest
possible estimate of liquid solution used toprepare the anthrax
letters was 1.7 percent of the
liquid solution that was concentrated down to create
the liquid contents of RMR-1029,
which never
contained more than one liter
of liquid, and contained less than 400 milliliters on October 4,
2001.

Or better yet, they should
never have made the comparison.

August 3, 2011 (B)
- Unlike the Anthrax Truther blogs where it seems that they only ask
meaningless questions and never really look for any answers, this web
site attempts to clarify
issues. The issues
that might need clarification at the moment are the revised US
government motions in the Stevens vs USA
lawsuit. The revisions don't have anything to do with the
legal issues, and it's the legal
issues that will be ruled upon by
Judge Hurley.

The first motion
was for a "Summary Judgment based on the absence of
proximate cause."

My "Plain Language Law Dictionary" defines "proximate cause" as "The
immediate cause of an injury or accident; the legal cause; the real
cause; a direct cause."

The same dictionary defines "Summary Judgment" as "a means of obtaining
the court's decision
without resorting to a formal Trial by Jury. Such
judgments are sought when the opposing parties are in agreement on the
facts in dispute but wish to obtain a ruling as to the question of law that is involved."

The question of law is whether Maureen Stevens has a legal case or
not. Can she prove negligence on the part of the
government? The government says she cannot because:

Prior
to Mr. Stevens’ death, there was no
historical basis for a person
to reasonably expect that, even if the government
negligently secured its anthrax, biological material would be used by a
thirdperson as part of a
bioterrorism attack on American soil against innocent victims like Mr.
Stevens.

and

If
the Court finds the anthrax attack that
killed Mr. Stevens “highly unusual, extraordinary” or “bizarre,” it should be
“most reluctant to attach tort liability” by finding proximate cause.

concluding with

Because Plaintiffs
could never present facts to show that decedent’s inhalation anthraxand
the intervening acts that gave rise to it was “a foreseeable and
probable consequence of thewrongful
actions of the defendant,” the government is entitled to summary
judgment onproximate
cause.

The second motion
re-filed on Friday was for a "Motion to Dismiss for
lack of Subject-Matter Jurisdiction (based on the FTCA's Assault and
Battery Exception)." This motion is harder to explain.

As I understand it, the government is saying that Judge Hurley has no
jurisdiction in this case, because the The
Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), a federal staute enacted by the
United States Congress in 1948, has an Assault and Battery Exception
that is applicable in this case. As I understand it, the
exception says that the government had no way of predicting that one of
its employees would commit such a crime, and, therefore, the Stevens
claim is barred (as invalid)
by the Assault and Battery Exception and it cannot be tried by
Judge Hurley or in any court.

And, that means that

Plaintiffs
cannot pursue their theory that
government negligence allowed Dr. Ivins (or any other government employee)
to perpetrate the attacks because all such claims lack subjectmatterjurisdiction and must be dismissed pursuant to
Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(1).

Besides,

If
Plaintiffs argue that government
negligence allowed Dr. Ivins, a government employee at the time of the attacks, to
murder Mr. Stevens, their claims must be dismissed for lack
subject-matter jurisdiction based on the
FTCA’s assault and battery exception. Alternatively, if Plaintiffs
reject the government’s
concession that Dr. Ivins was the assailant and attempt to argue that
government negligence allowed an
unknown assailant to murder Mr. Stevens, they cannot satisfy their
summaryjudgment burden to come
forward with evidence that establishes how government negligence actually led to the crime.

That last bit seems to put Stevens' lawyers between the rock and the
hard place. If Stevens accepts that Ivins was the
anthrax killer, then their case must be dismissed because of the
Assault and Battery Exception. If Stevens argues that Ivins was not the
anthrax killer, then their case must be dismissed because they have no
way of showing the government was negligent if they have no idea who
committed the crime or how the goverment let him do it.

Stevens lawyers might have a
counter-argument. But, I think it's also very possible that Judge
Hurley could rule without seeing any counter argument, since it's a
matter of his interpretation of the law.
Opposing interpretations are irrelevant, unless they are interpretations
from a higher court.August 3, 2011 (A)
- Hmm. I've never gotten into the habit of routinely tracking the
Stevens vs USA lawsuit.
So, I failed to notice that on Friday the 29th, the same day Judge
Hurley agreed to allow the government to file its amended motions, the
government did so. When I checked the Docket on the 29th, the
Judge's "endorsement" was the last entry. The government's
filings must have taken place later in the day.

So the next step appears to be for Judge Hurley to either (1) dismiss
the lawsuit,
(2) issue a Summary Judgment ending the lawsuit by ruling that Maureen
Stevens has not proved negligence by the government, or (3) rule
against the government on both
motions and allow the trial to go ahead in
December. If so, he could make his decision at any time. Or, the next step may be for Maureen Stevens' lawyers
to present their counter-arguments. Since they've been fully
aware of the issues for a long time, their counter-arguments could be
filed at any time.

Meanwhile, yesterday, another one of those sealed "system entries"
appeared on the docket. There's still no clue as to what they are
about. But the fact that it's sealed will undoubtedly convince
conspiracy theorists and True Believers that it can only be something
devious and sinister.

August 2, 2011 (B)
- I've been doing some research to try to find where I got some data
about the amount of "matrix" material in the New York Post
powder. I usually provide the link or identify the source in some
other way, but in a comment I wrote on March 20, 2011, I failed to do
so, although I left some hints for where to look. I still haven't
found the source, but while hunting I found an interesting report on
page 4 and 5 of Batch 2, Module 2 of the National Academies of Science
disk of 9,600 pages of documents. The author of the report is
redacted, but his title is given as "Senior Research Scientist,
USAMRIID", so it is almost certainly from Peter Jahrling. It's
titled:

At the bottom of page 4 and into page 5 it says about the Daschle
powder:

Occasional
aggregates appeared to have
flocculent material associated on the periphery (Figure 11). At
higher power, this flocculent material had a jagged appearance (Figure
12) which resembled, in some respects, the appearance of Bentonite
(Figure 13).

And, the first paragraph in the "Interpretation and conclusions"
section on page 5, the last sentence is:

A
flocculent material is occasionally
observed in association with the aggregates; at high power, this material resembles bentonite.

Flocculent means "woolly or fluffy." Figures 11, 12 and 13
attached to the document are too grainy to figure out what he was
actually seeing. David Willman's book "The
Mirage Man" identified Peter Jahrling as the source of the
misinformation about bentonite being in the Daschle powder. This
report is almost certainly confirmation of that. I'm mentioning
it here
because it will help me to remember where to find this information if I
need it again.

And, of course, the bentonite fiasco is a good example of a USAMRIID
scientist (and someone who knew Bruce Ivins) making scientific
statements about something he knew nothing about. The
"journalists" at McClatchy, ProPublica and PBS Frontline should
remember that when it comes to reporting opinions on lyophilizers and how to
dry
anthrax..

August 2, 2011 (A)
- I'm not sure what they're trying to do, but PBS Frontline has
evidently filed a bunch of FOIA requests for materials related to the
case against Bruce Ivins. One request
dated April 22, 2011 asks for:

Any
and all photographs or videos of: Steven
Hatfill, RMR-1029, Bruce
Ivins's laboratory - "B-313" or "B-3" in building 1425 of USAMRIID, and
any equipment that may have been used in the 2001 anthrax attacks - the
fermentor and/or lyophilizer.

Why Steven Hatfill was mentioned in the request is the biggest
question. And, one would think that Frontline would know that neither a fermentor nor a lyophilizer were used in
making the attack anthrax. But, maybe they don't know that.

Any
and all notebooks or written
documentation maintained by Ms Pat Worsham that reference any Bacillus
anthracis submissions made by Bruce Ivins in connection with the FBI's
Amerithrax Investigation.Any and all notebooks or written
documentation maintained by Ms Terry Abshire that reference any
Bacillus
anthracis submissions made by Bruce Ivins in connection with the FBI's
Amerithrax Investigation.

They are apparently trying
to track down exactly why the first FBIR submission by Ivins was
rejected. Or, more accurately, they are apparently trying to
track down what was written down
about the first FBIR submission by Ivins.

Keycard
access records for all persons to
Suite 5 for entry to the BSL-2 labs from August 2001 through November
2001.Keycard access records for
Bruce Ivins to Suite 5 for entry to the BLS-2 labs from August 2001
through November 2001.

Suite 5? Presumably, they mean Bacteriology Suite 5, which is
where the lyophilizer was stored in the hallway
outside of Stephen Little's lab. What do they think they will
learn about a machine that Ivins did notuse when making the attack
powders? And the
floorplan for Bacteriology Suite 5 seems to indicate that it had a
different kind of entrance than the other four Bacteriology
suites. It seems to have double swinging doors opening directly
into the suite's central corridor, instead of single doors entering
into male and female locker rooms. It has two large areas/rooms
which have no walls separating them from the central corridor.
Plus it appears to have no airlock. It wouldn't surprise me
if one could walk in one end of Suite 5 and out the other end without
ever swiping a keycard. The facts seem to indicate that keycards
were used only to access specific rooms in Suite 5, but I could be
wrong. The only time Suite 5 came up in the investigation
was when a search
warrant was issued for Room B505 in Suite 5. B505
appears to be a storage room.

I don't know what PBS Frontline will be saying in October when they air
their program about the anthrax attacks. But, based upon the
above information and their error-filled discussion on PBS
Newshour on July 20, 2011, things aren't looking good. It's
kind of late to be digging into basic
facts in an attempt to re-investigate
the anthrax attacks
of 2001 in time for a show to air in October - particularly when they
don't seem to know what the basic
facts are.

August 1, 2011
- "BugMaster" posted a message on Lew Weinstein's site which clearly
refers to the comment I wrote yesterday. Here is what
BugMaster wrote:

Pretty pathetic when the
New York Times attacks Propublica using Ed Lake as their mouthpiece!

I suppose I should be flattered that anyone would think that The New
York Times would use me as their "mouthpiece." However, I didn't
mean to suggest that The New York Times had anything to do
with anything. My source
feels that a person who formerly
worked at The New York Times was the "mastermind" behind the
"yellow journalism" articles about the Stevens vs USA lawsuit from both ProPublica and McClatchy. That person now works for
ProPublica.org.

The comment I wrote on Sunday morning was very convoluted. I can
see how it could have been misunderstood. I was trying to sort
out all the information I'd received on Saturday as I was writing the
comment. And, I ran out of time. So, I posted what I
had at about 10:45 a.m., and then modified it about fifteen times
during the rest of the day, as I tried to make it more
understandable. The end result was that I couldn't accept that
the ex-NY Times employee was the "mastermind" behind everything, because it seemed that
McClatchy reporters were also writing their own nonsense.

For what it's worth, during the month of July I happened to be tracking
the number of daily visitors to Lew Weinstein's site (in green) versus visitors to my
site (in red). Here
is the end result:

Interestingly, while Lew's site gets only
about a third of the visitors I get on average, a controversial news
event like the McClatchy/ProPublica manufactured story about DOJ
lawyers claiming that Ivins couldn't have made the attack anthrax will
generate a clear spike in the number of visitors to Lew's site.
That news broke on the 18th and 19th. I tend to get big spikes
only when there is some real
news.

July 31, 2011 -
I've
been advised by a highly reliable source that the McClatchy newpaper
chain isn't the
"mastermind" or driving force behind the blatant sensationalizing and
distortion of
minor details in the Stevens v USA lawsuit.
I'm told that the "mastermind" behind this latest example of "yellow
journalism" works at ProPublica.com.
McClatchy is allegedly just going along for the ride as a way to sell
more newspapers (aided by a reporter who can't tell fact
from fiction). And PBS Frontline has its sleeve caught on the
door handle of this runaway car wreck in progress.

While I agree that PBS Frontline seems to be getting dragged along on
this obvious piece of "yellow journalism," there seem to be definite
indications that McClatchy is taking the lead - at least on some of the bogus news
stories. When publishing the
same story, McClatchy
will sometimes contain inflammatory details omitted from the ProPublica
version. And, McClatchy clearly took the lead in the
April 21, 2011 video story titled "Did
FBI Target Wrong Man as Anthrax Killer?" which wildly distorted the
facts about the relevancy of the Bacillus
subtilis spores found in the media letters. In my comment
on April 21, I described that
news story as "a crazy and
illogical piece of reporting."
But, it could also be that I focused on articles from McClatchy and not
the articles from ProPublica.org because I use Google to do a lot of my
research, and Google tends to show the McClatchy articles but very few
of ProPublica's articles. Google evidently doesn't always
use
ProPublica as a key news source.

I was somewhat surprised to be informed that Gary Matsumoto was writing
for ProPublica at one time. I had never seen Matsumoto's April
23,
2010 ProPublica article on Henry Heine's opinions regarding Bruce
Ivins' abilities (or inabilities) to make anthrax spores. It was
titled "Colleague
Says Anthrax Numbers Add Up to Unsolved Case." I'd written at
length in my May 23, 2010
comment about the total nonsense and misinformation Dr. Heine provided
on a radio show, and I provided emails from Bruce Ivins himself showing
that what Dr. Heine stated was totally untrue. Of course, the
fact
that Gary Matsumoto was on the side of the people claiming that Bruce
Ivins couldn't have made the attack anthrax was no surprise to
me. It
was just a surprise that he had written for ProPublica. His
article
quoted Henry Heine:

"If Bruce did it, we
would've
turned him in for a million dollars in a heartbeat," said Heine,
referring to the government reward for information leading to the
capture of the anthrax mailer. "Seriously, though, reward or no reward,
we would've stopped him because that would've been the right thing to
do."

Before you can turn in a killer to collect the reward, you have to
realize he is
a killer and not just some goofy guy you work with. The mistake
wasn't
that Heine and others at USAMRIID failed to turn in Ivins, the mistake
was that they failed to realize that Ivins was making powdered anthrax
right under their noses in his lab at night and on weekends. They
didn't see anything strange or alarming about Ivins working alone and
unsupervised in a lab filled with dangerous pathogens. If they
cared
at all, they just assumed that whatever Ivins was doing alone in his
lab was just "Bruce being Bruce."

I don't
know if Gary Matsumoto still has any connection to ProPublica. My
source said he probably doesn't.
But, hearing Matsumoto's name again made me wonder if Dr. Stuart
Jacobsen
wasn't also around somewhere. And, sure enough, I was reminded
that Dr. Jacobsen was
interviewed by a McClatchy reporter for an
article printed on May 19, 2011. I already had the article in
my archives, and I'd commented on it the day after it was published:

May
20, 2011 - Yesterday's McClatchy
Newspapers
(Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, The Fresno Bee, etc.) contain an article titled "FBI
lab reports on anthrax attacks suggest another miscue."
Evidently, someone was reading the 9,600 pages of FBI documents the FBI
sent to the National Academy of Sciences and discovered that the
element Silicon was found in the attack anthrax. And, then they
heard that some scientists believe the Silicon was put there
deliberately as part of a sophisticated process for
weaponization. Ohmygod!
That must have been
a real shock to the McClatchy
reporter. For the rest of us, of course, it's been discussed and thoroughly debunked for almost 10
years.

But I wasn't seeing the BIG picture that my source was seeing. I
thought the McClatchy article about silica was just another careless
reporter getting an "expert
opinion" from someone who isn't really an expert on the subject under
discussion (Dr. Jacobsen works with microchips, not with spores).
Now,
it seems to be part of the pattern. McClatchy and ProPublica are
both getting opinions from "experts" who tell them what they want to
hear in
order to generate "yellow journalism" headlines. And the Stevens
vs
USA lawsuit is their latest cause. They are wildly distorting the
facts about the lawsuit simply to create a sensation where there is
only minor news. Sensations sell newspapers and advertising
space,
while minor news just bores people. And, meanwhile, PBS has been
working for a year and a half on a major story to air in October that
will - apparently - heavily rely on all this distorted nonsense.

I had planned to write about the Stevens lawsuit for this morning's
comment, but the information about the "mastermind" at ProPublica.org
seemed far more interesting. Unfortunately, it's also highly
problematic in that
it
connects to something that I haven't studied in detail, something that
has absolutely nothing to do with the anthrax attacks of 2001: the Wen
Ho Lee fiasco.

I wasn't paying that much attention in 1999 and 2000 when the New York
Times was allegedly campaigning
to find who was at fault in the theft of secrets from Los Alamos.
According to The
American Journalism Review:

The
New York Times uncritically embraced the outlook of investigators in
its breathless coverage of the Wen Ho Lee case. As a result, the
nation's premier news organization tarnished not only the scientist but
also its own reputation.

It appears to be very reminiscent of Nicholas Kristoff's campaign to
get Steven
Hatfill investigated and/or arrested in the anthrax case. And
eventually, the New York Times apologized, sort of, in a September 26,
2000 article titled "The
Times and Wen Ho Lee," which said:

The Times's coverage of
this case, especially the articles published in the first few months,
attracted criticism from competing journalists and media critics and
from defenders of Dr. Lee, who contended that our reporting had stimulated a
political frenzy amounting to a witch hunt. After Dr. Lee's
release, the White House, too, blamed the pressure of coverage in the
media, and specifically The Times, for having propelled an overzealous
prosecution by the administration's own Justice Department.

And

Nevertheless, far from
stimulating a witch hunt, The Times had clearly shown before Dr. Lee
was even charged that the case against him was circumstantial and
therefore weak, and that there were numerous other potential sources
for the design of the warhead.

There
are articles we should have
assigned but did not. We never prepared a full-scale profile of Dr.
Lee, which might have humanized him and provided some balance.

And

In those instances where we fell short of our standards in our
coverage of this story, the blame lies principally with those who
directed the coverage, for not raising questions that occurred
to us only later. Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in
any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their
newsgathering in the face of some fierce attacks.

The article says "the blame
lies
principally with those who directed the coverage," but those people are
not identified. I'm told that one of them is the current
"mastermind"
behind the Stevens vs USA lawsuit coverage.

But, it's all too vague and
unclear for
me to confirm or dispute. And, I have no desire to dig into the
Wen Ho
Lee matter for further details. It's too far afield from my
primary
interest: the anthrax attacks of 2001. Even the direct
connection between the "mastermind" and all the conspiracy
theories about the "weaponized" spores
supposedly used in the anthrax attacks is a
New York Times article from before
the attacks.

All the information I was
given yesterday was highly interesting, but it's from a very different
perspective than mine. We totally agree that the Stevens lawsuit
reporting by ProPublica and McClatchy is "yellow journalism," but we
came to that conclusion via very different paths. Because we
arrived at the same conclusion via different paths, we can be very
certain that our mutual conclusion is correct. But, the different
paths
we took make it difficult to discuss details such as who is the
"mastermind." Any such discussions would
be opinions about paths and
methods. Opinion vs opinion discussions rarely get anywhere and
could create disagreement where there really isn't any disagreement.

However, as ProPublica and
McClatchy
continue to
distort the facts about the Stevens' lawsuit, I'll be more
wary of where to assign the blame. Sometimes a mob coming down
Main Street will merge in front of the courthouse with a mob that came
down First Street, and it'll look like a single mob, but it's really
two mobs with two leaders.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, July 24, 2011, thru Saturday, July 30, 2011
July 30, 2011 - As expected,
McClatchy newspapers has reacted to yesterday's ruling by Judge
Hurley. The Miami Herald has published an article titled "Judge
allows feds to revise filing in anthrax case." The article
calls the revision by the DOJ "an embarrassing flip-flop" and says,

Justice Department lawyers,
defending a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of the first
victim of the 2001 anthrax letter attacks, won a judge's approval
Friday to withdraw a court filing that seemed to undermine the FBI's assertion
that an Army researcher was the killer.
...

The
initial filing asserted flatly
that Army researcher Bruce
Ivins, whom the FBI accused of manufacturing the anthrax, lacked the
"specialized equipment" needed to produce the deadly powder at a U.S.
bio-weapons research facility in Frederick, Md.

The
revised filing said that Ivins had access to a refrigerator-sized
machine known as a lyophilizer, which can be used to dry solutions such
as anthrax, at the facility in a less secure lab. In addition, it said
that Ivins also had a smaller "speed-vac" that could be used for drying
substances in his containment lab.

McClatchy seems determined to distort the
facts. Why do they omit the fact that the DOJ also said Ivins had
the ability to air dry the
spores? Why do they only mention
the drying techniques which Ivins was unlikely
to have used? Wikipedia defines "Yellow Journalism"
this way:

Yellow journalism or
the yellow press is a type of journalism that presents little
or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching
headlines to sell more newspapers.Techniques may include exaggerations of
news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.

McClatchy seems determined
to continuously exaggerate a single mistake by turning it into a "news
event," and they are "scandal-mongering" by claiming that it was a
major change in position by the DOJ and a great embarrassment for
them. It's pure "sensationalism." It's also rabble rousing.
They appear to be deliberately trying to get the public stirred up
about this case, possibly because they believe it will be dismissed by
Judge Hurley, and they want to be in a position to be appear "outraged"
by the dismissal and to make the public "outraged" as well.

If Judge Hurley dismisses the case, I'll be saddened by the fact that
Maureen Stevens wasn't compensated for her loss, but I'm not going to
be outraged because the
government had a better legal case.

July 29, 2011 (C) - In the Stevens
vs USA lawsuit case today, as
expected by everyone except McClatchy et al, Judge Hurley "endorsed"
(authorized) the government's motion to correct the wording in their
July 15 motion to dismiss and their motion for a Summary Judgment.

July 29, 2011 (B)
- ProPublica has released a
transcript of a July 26 podcast
where ProPublica's managing
editor Stephen Engelberg gave his very puzzling thoughts on the FBI's
Amerithrax
investigation and the Maureen Stevens vs USA
lawsuit. Engelberg
is
billed as "a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the former
investigations editor of The New York Times and the managing editor of
The Oregonian." What is so puzzling about Engelberg's talk is
that
he
seems to be claiming that the DOJ said a lot of things about Ivins'
guilt that are not in the public
record.
So, there's no way of knowing if it just comes from Engelberg's
imagination, from bullshit fed to him by a McClatchy reporter or by
Maureen Stevens' lawyers, or if it
actually happened. For example, Engelberg claims
that the
DOJ's attorneys in the Stevens lawsuit actually accepted and believed
what Ivins' friends and associates stated in depositions, and:

It was from that point
forward that the civil division
said, "OK. Well, Ivins couldn't have done it. We'll accept that. We'll
accept what the government witnesses are saying here. But
therefore, if he couldn't have done it, was that foreseeable? Would
these supervisors know this? If he couldn't have done it and it wasn't
foreseeable that he did it, then we can't be held liable for it.”

Then, Stephen Engleberg says:

What
happened next, just to continue chronologically here Mike, is that the government filed a statement that
Ivins couldn't have done it based on these interviews. The civil
division apparently had not spoken with the criminal division about
what they intended to say.

And
so when this appeared, criminal
division lawyers were quite irritated, quite angry, and about 24 hours
later they filed an amended set of things in which they corrected the
statements. They said, "Well, Bruce Ivins is the guy who did it. And while he couldn't have done it in this
specific place where there was special equipment to contain the germs,
he might have done it somewhere else."

The statements by
Engleberg appear to be all totally
bogus and made up.
The facts say, the DOJ never
believed or suggested that Ivins made the attack anthrax anywhere
except in his own lab during the evenings and on weekends when he
worked alone and unsupervised without any verifiable explanation for
what
he was doing. The "special equipment" wasn't equipment to contain the germs, it was equipment
to dry spores, but there were
other ways to dry spores. This appears to be an example of
someone talking about the case who really doesn't understand very much
about the case. ("A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.")

And, it also appears that all this bogus information will be part of a
PBS
"Frontline" program to air in October. July 29, 2011 (A)
-
I'm going to try to summarize the situation with the Stevens vs USA lawsuit as I understand it:

A.
Maureen Steven's lawyers cannot prove
negligence by the government.
B. The lawsuit was filed using Florida law and Federal law overrides
State law in this case.

2. McClatchy
newspapers and others found an error in a single sentence in the filing and
falsely promoted it as a change in the government's case and the
government's position on Ivins' guilt. It was no such thing.

3. On July 19, the DOJ filed a "Motion of
Errata" to correct that error and others.

5. Judge Hurley evidently saw that the errors had nothing to do
with the issues, but he also noted that the corrections were not done
in the proper legal way. So, on July 25 he "struck" as "unauthorized" the changes in
the "Motion of Errata." However, he did so "without prejudice,"
which meant the DOJ could make the corrections again in the proper way
if they felt they had "good cause."

6. McClatchy et al jumped on Judge Hurley's order as a way
to futher
distort the situation and again turn it into something about Ivins'
guilt or innocence, instead of it being about a motion to dismiss the
lawsuit.

7. The DOJ evidently felt that, because the error in their filing
was being distorted in the media, they had "good cause" to correct
it. On July 27 the DOJ filed a "Motion for Leave" asking
Judge Hurley's authorization to correct the errors in their July 15
filing before he gives his ruling on the issues in the filing.

8. On July 29, Judge Hurley authorized the
corrections by "endorsing" the "Motion for Leave."

9. The DOJ will then file corrected
versions of their July 15 motions to dismiss.

10. I assume that Maureen Stevens' lawyers will then file motions to
try to prevent a dismissal or a ruling against them.

11. Then it will be up to Judge Hurley to decide if he will dismiss the
case or rule that the DOJ won the case.

12. If Judge Hurley rules in the DOJ's favor, McClatchy will
almost certainly go nuts and declare it to be a miscarriage of justice, and they'll
cite their own false claims about that single erroneous sentence as
showing deviousness on the part of the government and how "the little
guy" cannot receive a break in this country. Or, as
Stevens' lawyers put it, "how
far the government will go to obstruct
justice in the Stevens case, to try
and win the day by misleading the court."

13. If Judge Hurley rules against the motions
to dismiss, the case will forward with a trial scheduled to begin in
December.

14. As I see it, the way the facts have been distorted by
McClatchy et al, and the anger shown by Stevens' lawyers, seem to
indicate that the chances of Judge Hurley allowing the case to continue
are extremely slim.

July
28, 2011 - McClatchy is at it
again!
I can't be sure if it's out of malice, avarice, just plain ignorance,
or an attempt to protect the "little guy" against the "big guy" even
when the "little guy" doesn't have the law on his side, but McClatchy
continues to distort the
facts about the Stevens vs USA lawsuit,
apparently in order to sell more newspapers.

A federal judge has blocked, at least temporarily, a
Justice Department attempt to back
away from court admissions
that appeared to undercut previous FBI assertions that an Army
researcher was responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks.

There were no "admissions" in the filing that
contained the erroneous
sentence. A mistake is
not an admission.

McClatchy also gets the facts wrong about the correction:

That filing asserted that
Bruce Ivins, who the FBI alleges manufactured the anthrax in his
government lab, did not have
access in the lab to the special equipment needed to make the deadly
powder. The Justice Department wants to revise the filing to say
that Ivins did have access to the
equipment elsewhere at the U.S. Army bio-weapons facility in
Frederick, Md., where he worked.

The DOJ's correction says
that Ivins had access in his own
lab to different ways to dry anthrax spores. So, he didn't need the
lyophilizer which was stored in another part of the building.

Here's another blatant distortion of the facts by McClatchy:

In
seeking to dismiss the suit, which alleges government negligence in
failing to secure anthrax stocks at the Frederick facility, the
government has argued that taxpayers
have no liability for harm caused when a federal employee commits an
assault or battery.

The government is using an
assault and battery case as a precedent
in asking for dismissal of the Stevens lawsuit. The government is
not saying or even
suggesting that the murder of five people is merely assault or
battery. They're saying that, the government isn't liable for
Bruce Ivins' personal actions in the Amerithrax case because, legally,
Ivins' actions were his own and could not be predicted by the
government. (Personally, I'd like to see Maureen Stevens
get some sort of compensation, but I can also understand the reasoning
behind the law.)

Maureen Stevens' lawyers had been
arguing that the government should
have realized that Bruce Ivins was dangerous and unstable when
they hired him. They argued that the government was negligent in
hiring him and is therefore liable for all damages caused by
Ivins.

Here is how that particular argument is described on page 6 of the
original "Motion for a Summary Judgment" filing on July 15, 2011, which
can be found HERE:

Plaintiffs [Maureen
Stevens & family] still maintain that the government negligentlyfailed to properly hire, investigate,
monitor, train, and supervise its employees. Additionally,Plaintiffs’ expert
submissions specifically contend that the government is liable because itnegligently
hired, screened, retained, or supervised Dr. Ivins, thereby allowing
him to perpetratethe anthrax attacks. For
example, Dr. Park Dietz, Plaintiffs’ retained expert in forensicpsychiatry, has
specifically addressed the “adequacy of hiring and retention decisions
regardingBruce Ivins”; reviewed Dr.
Ivins’ mental health history; and opined that the government wasnegligent
because its hiring and retention of Dr. Ivins allowed him to perpetrate
the attacks

But, according to
the government, earlier this year, Stevens' lawyers realized that their
claim could be negated by the
precedent known as "The FTCA’s assault and battery exception."
That precent says that US law
overrides State law in certain types of civil cases. Here
is what the government wrote about the Stevens' change in tactics in
the footnote that begins on page 5 and continues on page 6:

For
almost two years, from June 15, 2009,
when discovery opened, until April 8, 2011, when Plaintiffs (likely in anticipationof this motion [for a Summary
Judgment]) moved to withdraw the stipulation, the
government operated under the proposition that the identity of the
anthrax assailant was established
for purposes of this action. ... In their own words,
Plaintiffs opted to withdraw the
stipulation, in part, because it would “impair the [Plaintiffs’]
ability to rebut the defenses of the
Defendant.” ... Nonetheless, Plaintiffs
cannot be allowed to sidestep the government’s
motion based on the assault and battery exception simply by withdrawing
the stipulation, only to offer
evidence at trial that the government negligently caused Mr. Stevens’ death through acts or
omissions related to its employment relationship with Dr. Ivins.

The FTCA's assault and
battery exception says that US law
overrides State law, and that's why the government also filed to
have the Stevens' lawsuit dismissed
because Florida law is no longer applicable in the case.

In an attempt to save
their legal case, Maureen Stevens' lawyers changed their argument to
claim that Ivins did not do
it, and therefore the government can still be shown to be negligent
under Florida State law. It seems they can only win if it is
uncertain who sent the anthrax letters.

I'm no lawyer, but it seems like the Stevens case has fallen
apart. And, it seems like McClatchy is distorting the facts to
make it seem like the government did something improper or
illegal. It appears to be a
blantant attempt to mislead the
public about a complex legal issue that could result in the
"little
guy" (Maureen Stevens & Family) getting defeated by the "big guy"
(the United States Government). I can almost bet that if Judge
Hurley dismisses the lawsuit, McClatchy et al will be proclaming it was
the result of some devious and unscrupulous action by the Department of
Justice.

Sometimes the "little guy"
just loses because the law isn't on his (or her) side.

July 27, 2011 (B)
- The government has filed for a "Motion For Leave" to re-do the
corrections the judge "struck" as "unauthorized" couple days ago in the
Stevens vs USA lawsuit.
All it means is that, this time, the government is asking for authorization (or leave) to make the
corrections. There's no disagreement from Maureen Stevens'
lawyers, and the judge said it would be okay, so Judge Hurley will
almost certainly authorize
the changes to eliminate some misstatements that sent McClatchy
and PBS into Looney Toon territory.

July
27, 2011 (A)
-
Yesterday's New
York Times contains a short but very interesting article by William
Broad about Anders Breivik's planned use of anthrax to take over
Europe. I particularly enjoyed reading this paragraph:

“He was probably no more
capable than an Islamic terrorist group looking at anthrax,” said
Edward G. Lake, a retired computer analyst in Racine, Wis., who has
written extensively on anthrax since the American attacks in late 2001,
which killed five people and sickened at least 17 others.

"He was probably no more
capable than an Islamic terrorist group looking at anthrax," anthrax expert Edward Lake said

I guess that now means I can refer to myself as an "anthrax
expert." It was in the media,
so it must
be true!

Someone also mentioned this morning that I'm quoted in a self-published
book by Laurie
Garrett titled "I
Heard The Sirens Scream." The book appears to be only
available on Kindle. One
Anthrax Truther has been raving about the book for about a
week. A part of the blurb for the book gives an idea of the
source of his
ravings:

Part two, NEW WORLD ORDER,
details the repercussions of these events, transformations of critical
government institutions, public health disasters, and what, in
particular, the specter of terrorism meant for the American people.
Revelations abound in this book, including:

• The bizarre chemistry of The Plume that rose from the burning crushed
World Trade Center for four months, endangering the health of hundreds
of thousands of New Yorkers.
• Evidence that al-Qaeda may have
been behind the anthrax mailings.

Other
Anthrax Truthers, however, are unimpressed by the book because it
doesn't mention their particular theories.

I received a Kindle for Christmas, because I had mentioned that I had
put my
WWII novel on Kindle even though I didn't have a Kindle. I've
yet to
turn it on. Is it really worth $5.99 to see what Laurie Garrett
said about me? Hmm. I dunno. She couldn't have said
anything bad, because the Anthrax Truthers haven't posted her comments
all over the Internet. I doubt that it would be praise, if she
thinks al Qaeda sent the letters. A neutral mention? Ho hum.

While
deposition transcripts are
occasionally accompanied by “errata” sheets intended forthe correction of
stenographic errors in interpretation, there is no authority under the
Federal Rulesof Civil Procedure or
local rules of this court allowing for unsolicited submission of
“errata”sheets purporting to
correct editorial errors in legal briefing. The court is thus not
inclined to acceptthe defendant’s invitation
to red-line its earlier submitted papers in the manner suggested.If there are substantive
errors of material fact in the earlier filed papers that the governmentwishes to withdraw or
correct at this juncture, the appropriate mechanism for bringing this
to theattention of the court is
by motion seeking permission to file an amended motion or supportingstatement, supported by
good cause shown. While this order is without prejudice for the
defendantto file such a motion,
counsel is advised that merely
finding a different, better or more detailed wayto express a thought does not
constitute “good cause” shown for the submission of amendedpleadings or motions
before this court.

So, in their rush to correct the error after the media made such a big
noise about it, the government committed another error and didn't
follow the proper procedures to make such a correction.
Furthermore, the judge saw the error as simply stating something in a
less than perfect way, and probably not worth correcting in the first
place. The judge's ruling is "without prejudice," meaning
that the government can correct the error in a different way if they
want to.

The fact that McClatchy and others in the media jumped on the error and
turned it into headlines doesn't concern the court. It's just the
media doing what it does best, making mountains out of mole
hills.

July 25, 2011 (B)
- Holy crap!!! Someone
just suggested I do a search for the word "anthrax" in Anders
Behring
Breivik' manifesto. I
had never even occurred to me that Breivik might mention the subject,
but he definitely did.
Starting on page 961, Breivik writes about how easily anthrax can be
obtained (he was a farmer) and how to use it.

On page 962, Breivik wrote:

Concentrated anthrax spores
were used for bio-terrorism in the 2001
anthrax attacks in the United States, delivered by mailing postal
letters
containing the spores. Only a few grams of material were used in these
attacks
and in August 2008 the US Department of Justice announced they believed
that
Dr. Bruce Ivins, a senior bio-defence researcher, was responsible.

Bruce Ivins was a
right wing, Christian, cultural conservative who allegedly sent several
anonymous letters to members of the US Congress and the media causing
five
fatalities and injuring dozens of others.

On page 966, Breivik wrote:

Effect and
employment of WMD’s against cultural Marxist/ multiculturalist targets

A briefcase full of high grade anthrax
has the
potential to kill as many as 200 000 people if dispersed
effectively.
However, this is not our objective. Our aim is to execute surgically
precise
attacks with a medium to low amount of casualties (concentrations of
category A
and B cultural Marxists/ multiculturalists).

The number of civilian loses will be acceptable for
certain targets. Certain target building complexes can contain as many
as 30-50
category A traitors, 200-300 category B traitors and 2000-3000 category
C
traitors with an acceptable amount of civilians.

And, it goes on and on
about plans to obtain anthrax, etc. On page 970, there is a
sample letter to send with anthrax if you are planning an attack in the
name of Breivik's cause. On Page 972 there is this:

It
should be noted that even if the letters (mailing campaigns) doesn’t
contain
real anthrax but instead a hoax powder, it will still have very
beneficial
results. Many cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites will defect,
quit
politics, their media, university, artist position as a result. Some
may even
realise what they are doing/have done and may join our struggle.

On page 973 there is this:

“Decisive-blow”
campaigns – high grade anthrax mailing campaigns

Provided we
have established a laboratory in Europe and the necessary equipment, we
would be able to
launch a “decisive-blow-campaign”.

This
operation will involve at least 21 individuals
(depending if we already have the necessary amount of high grade
anthrax) and will require a
complete database of all category A and B traitor names,
addresses etc. Personnel needed: 1 administrator, 20 for distribution.

Would
require 818(409) kilograms of anthrax (2(1)
grams of anthrax per targeted individual):

Denmark,
Greece, Finland, Iceland
and perhaps Italy
should be excluded from the list.

There are a total of 409 067 category A
and B traitors
in Western Europe according to the current
classification system (1010 per million).

Be
creative; create a letterhead which is likely to be
forwarded directly to the target individual.

So, it looks like Breivik
wasn't just looking to save Norway from outsiders, he was looking to
save all of Europe, and he was planning to use a massive anthrax attack
to do it. And he had everyone classified into groups.
I'm not sure what to think about all this. In a way, it means
nothing to the Amerithrax case. On the other hand, it says the
Amerithrax case taught at least one Hitler-wannabe that using anthrax
to create havoc is a great idea.

July 25, 2011 (A)
-
We seem to have a new front runner in the race to see which newspaper
or media outlet can make the most
presposterous statement about the
Amerithrax investigation. In an opinion piece in today's
Frederick
News-Post titled "Another
Ivins twist," some unnamed person opened with this:

Even the feds can't seem to agree on
whether or not Bruce Ivins was responsible for the creation and deadly
distribution of anthrax in 2001.

Then, he or she wrote (in part):

The equipment necessary to
adequately dry the anthrax spores wasn't in the contained lab in 2001.
"If someone had used that to dry down that preparation, I would have
expected that area to be very, very contaminated, and I would have
expected some of them to become ill," said Patricia Worsham, USAMRIID
bacteriology division chief.

In short, a number of experts
concede it is highly unlikely that Ivins would have gone unnoticed in
his Detrick lab manufacturing the amount of anthrax at the toxicity
level contained in the deadly, disease-laden letters.

Of course, in the tortuous
logic of the legal system, a
Justice Department spokesman argued that this doesn't mean Ivins didn't
do it, only that he didn't have the
ability to do it at USAMRIID, "and thus the United States
should not be held liable for his actions."

No one in the Justice
Department ever said any such thing. The DOJ merely said that
that the fact that it
would have been difficult for Ivins to use the lyophilizer just meant
he didn't necessarily use the lyophilizer, he could have dried the
spores some other way. Ivins still did dried the spores at
USAMRIID.

Interestingly, of the five comments made in response to that "opinion"
piece, three point out that the News-Post is totally wrong. One
says, "Ivins is guilty. Get over it." And the fifth
believes the ridiculous statement from the News-Post.July 24, 2011 -
I get a haircut about once every four months, whether I need one or
not. While getting my hair cut last week (I really needed one), the barber
asked me
some friendly questions about my day, which led to me explaining that I
spend a lot of time on the Internet learning science by arguing science.
Although I didn't
mention it to the barber, I'm also learning
law by arguing law. And, I'm learning psychology by arguing
psychology.
Generally speaking, arguments about science lead me into doing research
to make certain that I understand the science and that my scientific
arguments are valid. The people on the other side of the
argument don't generally argue the science, they do research to find
"experts" who seem to agree with them. For example in the
argument over whether or not the attack spores were weaponized with
silicon, I researched every detail, and I created a web page about how different forces
affect spores. And, I asked everyone to point out errors if
they could find any.

The people on the other side of the argument found scientists at
USAMRIID who think Ivins was innocent because they believe the spores
were weaponized and Ivins didn't have the equipment or capability to
weaponize spores. The facts say
the spores were not
weaponized, but the other side found "experts" who believe the
spores were weaponized.

The argument will probably never get resolved because we're not using
the same rules for resolution. But, I truly enjoy the process
because it's extremely interesting
and educational. Learning and research are two of my most
enjoyable pasttimes.

But the "time" of the
October mailing was never nailed down by the investigators! It could
have been October 9th, October 8th, October 7th, even October 6th.

How then can you expect ANYONE to "prove" (and this is the
investigation's burden, not the suspect/defendant's)what he was doing
on the night of X, if you don't tell him when the night of X was?!?!?!?

That's a very interesting argument for a non-lawyer who is interested
in learning more about the law. "Anonymous" is arguing that the
government has to show exactly
when Ivins drove to Princeton so that Ivins' could show what he was
doing during that exact
time. It's a totally invalid argument, of course, but what
is the best way to explain why
it is invalid? That's where the learning comes in.

I spent at least an hour writing my response. First I worked on
one argument, then I revised it a bit, then a bit more, then I changed
to a different argument. I finally wrote a response that I knew
wasn't the best response I could come up with, but I'd run out of
time. Arguing about the Amerithrax case is a hobby, not an
obsession. I do it for fun. And, I shut down operations at
5 p.m., almost regardless of how interesting things are at that
moment. They'll still be interesting when I return at 8 a.m. the
next day. And, I often do my best thinking when I'm away from the
computer.

The argument that it's the government's job to determine exactly when Ivins drove to Princeton
is a false argument.
It's an argument from someone who doesn't understand evidence or the
legal
process. The argument would never even come up in court.
The government just has to show the time
frame when the letters were mailed (October 6, 7, 8 or 9) and
that Ivins couldn't account for his whereabouts during that period of
time. So, he had the ability
to drive to Princeton to mail the letters.

The rest
of the evidence in the case says that Ivins was the anthrax
mailer. Ivins claimed he wasn't the anthrax mailer, and that he
never drove to New Jersey to mail the letters. The evidence is
presented to a jury along with Ivins' claims. The jury determines
whether they believe Ivins'
story or not. It's not a
matter of proof. It's a matter of weighing evidence.
Ivins said he didn't mail the letters. The evidence says he
did. Therefore, if the jury believes the evidence, Ivins must have driven to Princeton to
mail the letters. If he cannot prove that he was somewhere else,
then the jury will consider his claims to be lies, and they'll find him
guilty.

I'm probably still not explaining things as clearly as they can be
explained. Some lawyer or judge out there could probably quote
something that fully clarifies the situation clearly in ten words or
so.
Maybe, if I do enough research I'll find those words, and the next time
the argument about alibis comes up, I'll be able to use them.

While arguing about Ivins lack of an alibi, I'm arguing with a person
who knew Ivins and who simply cannot believe that someone she knew was
a mass murderer. So, in a way, I'm also learning psychology by
arguing psychology. I have to search for the right words to convince the other person that it
is common for people to not accept the facts if the facts show they
failed to realize something they think they would definitely have
realized. Unfortunately, unlike a session with a psychologist, I
don't have them alone inside a room
for 50 minutes of probative questioning and answering. It's more
like one
question every couple days in a crowded forum. So, the chances
are very slim of convincing anyone that they were wrong in their trust
of Bruce Ivins.

I've been a science buff all my life. I've been a psychology buff
for much of my life. I'm not much of a law buff, but I'm getting
into it because a court room would have been where the science and
psychology would have been argued in the Amerithrax case. It's
even more fascinating to me today than it was ten years ago, because I
now know more science, I now know more psychology and I now know more
law. Thus, I can usually find better arguments that the other
side cannot dispute
- except to say that they simply do not believe the facts, and
therefore the government must be wrong about the facts.

When I get someone to argue that they do not believe the facts, then I
feel that I've won the argument - even though the other side totally
disagrees. When they argue that they have found an "expert" who
also doesn't believe the facts, I just chuckle to myself and shake my
head over the complex psychology involved. When they argue that
they believe the facts, they just have different facts and can prove
their facts, I would sit up and pay attention. But they never do
that.

[In Breivik's 1,500 page
manifesto, he] dismisses concepts such as political correctness,
feminism and major religions and philosophies including Islam and
Marxism and defends his views by quoting people he
views as authoritative.

So, even Anders Breivik can quote "experts" who he feels support his
beliefs.

July 23, 2011 -
I feel like I should write something about the Norway tragedies.
When the news first broke about the Oslo bomb explosion, everyone's
first assumption was that it was the work of Muslim terrorists like al
Qaeda. But, then it was learned that there were killings at a
"youth camp" on an island not far from Oslo, about a thirty minute trip
away. And, almost as soon as the news broke about the killings on
the island, the reports also said they had captured the killer, a
six-foot-tall, 32-year-old, blonde, blue eyed Norwegian named Anders
Behring Breivik.

And now we know he's a Right Wing, anti-Muslim Christian
fundamentalist, and he
appears to have been responsible for both incidents. It may turn
out that there were others involved, but it wouldn't surprise me if it
turned out to be the work of just one hate-filled person.

My initial interest was grabbed by the fact that no one seemed to know
what kind of bomb had exploded in Oslo, or even where the bomb went
off. Most news articles were saying the bomb went off in a
building. But, I kept seeing a black car
laying on its side in pictures and videos, and from some angles it
looked like the car had been blown open. That kind of damage
couldn't have come from an explosion in a nearby building. The
damage to the buildings was wide-spread, going on for blocks. If
the explosion had occurred inside a building, there wouldn't have been
any doubt about the source of the exposion. It would have
occurred in the building where the only thing left on the floor where
the explosion took place would be the iron and steel frame of the
building. There was no such damage to any building.

To me, the black car seemed to be the source of the explosion. It
seemed to come from a bomb in the back of the car that produced almost
no shrapnel, just a huge pressure
wave that bounced off the heavy
concrete of the nearby buildings and later caused confusion about the
actual
source. (My total knowledge of the subject of "pressure wave
damage" comes from a movie "Blown Away.")
It may have been a fertilizer bomb hidden under a blanket.
Breivik worked on a farm, and he could have had easy access to large
amounts of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. And, the bomb seems to
have been detonated by a timer set to go off at 3:30 p.m., giving
Breivik the time he needed to get to the island where he would start
the more
horrible part of his complex plan - the killing of over 80 people
(presumably mostly teenagers) at
a youth camp connected to Norway's ruling political party.

The anti-government aspect is somewhat reminiscent of Timothy McVeigh
and the Oklahoma City
bombing. Breivik used a much smaller bomb, but the bomb went off
at the bottom of a canyon of buildings, causing the pressure wave to
bounce around in the canyon for blocks. And, in this case the
culprit
didn't try to escape after setting the timer, he sped to another
location to kill more innocent victims and then to give himself up when
finally confronted by the police. And, he's now explaining to the
police his reasons for his actions.

He has apparently already explained his hatreds in postings on the
Internet, and he was the member of some radical Right Wing
organizations. I'm not sure how much explaining is required in a
situation where we've heard it all before. I don't really want to
listen to why he deliberately
and cold-bloodedly killed over 80 people associated with the political
party that he hated so much. I've already seen too
many people trying to explain their mindless hatreds.

July 22, 2011 -
Oh, great! Just what we need! A new mystery! Yesterday, five sealed docket entries were added to
the Stevens vs USA lawsuit docket.
The docket just says:

Is it something done as a result of the brouhaha generated by McClatchy
newspapers and PBS over a single
sentence? Maybe. But, why
would it require five
entries? Is it the sealed information about Ivins' mental
condition from his health care providers? I doubt it, but it
could be. There were six sealed depositions attached to docket
entry #155, but they weren't "System Entries." Each entry from
yesterday is described as a "SYSTEM ENTRY." That could mean it
only affects the docket recording system. There have been no such
previous entries in the Stevens vs USA docket.
And, looking through the other dockets I've tracked over the years, Stevens vs Battelle, Hatfill
vs Aschcroft, Hatfill vs Foster and Hatfill vs New York Times, none of them ever
had a "System Entry."

Conspiracy theorists and True Believers feed on mysteries. The
only guess I have is that it could be something the judge demanded in
order to prevent the lawyers in the case from making any more
inflamatory statements like this one:

"It just shows how far the government will go to obstruct
justice in the Stevens case, to try
and win the day by misleading the court with facts that ... only
days later, they now claim to be inaccurate."

The fact that that statement is missing from some
versions of the McClatchy article
could indicate that Stevens' lawyers
regretted making such a statement, and/or the judge repremanded them
for making it. But how could they get the media to change
it? Wouldn't the media just create a "news" story about how they
were asked to change it?

The furor the media created over a simple mistatement was stupid,
ridiculous and incredible. Stevens' lawyers, like
scientists in the Iowa State fiasco,
could have just been swept up in the media's mindless feeding frenzy.

July 21, 2011 - Groan. It's
beginning to look like I'm not going to get anything done on my book
this week at all. This morning I see another McClatchy "news" article
on the same subject as yesterday. This one is in The Miami Herald
and is titled "Justice
Department waffling in anthrax case could be costly, experts say."
The "experts" are (1) Ivins' lawyer, Paul Kemp, and (2) an ACLU lawyer
in Miami, John De Leon. Richard Schuler, the lead lawyer
for the Stevens family isn't included, but he has claims of his
own. According to the Miami Herald:

Now, he [Schuler] said, the
[DOJ's] civil lawyers are trying "to walk a tightrope of facts in this
case in order to attempt to prevent the Stevens family from getting
justice. It just shows how far the government will go to obstruct
justice in the Stevens case, to try
and win the day by misleading the court with facts that ... only
days later, they now claim to be inaccurate."

Interestingly, ProPublica.org's
version of the story (they're one of the "authors" of both version's of the article)
doesn't include the inflamatory sentence highlighted in red
above. Obstructing justice? Really? Misleading
the court? Really?

McClatchy reporters evidently found an "expert" who would tell
them what they wanted to hear.

John De Leon, a Miami
lawyer who's the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, said
the legal flip-flop "undermines the government's credibility" in the
civil suit,

Is John De Leon truly an
expert on the case? Why isn't his expertise on the case
described? I keep remembering the
situation in Iowa when the media was running around finding all
sorts of "experts" willing to speculate on where the Ames strain came
from. The statements by those "experts" about how the Ames strain
came from a cow that died in Iowa in the 1950s were all totally false. The Ames strain was never found anywhere
in Iowa. The media just found "experts" willing to speculate
without any solid facts. "Experts" were also found by ABC news to
claim that the spores in the letters were coated with bentonite in a
way that could only be done by government labs in three
countries. Again, total
bullshit. They just found "experts" willing to speculate
without any solid facts. The "experts" may have simply assumed
that what the reporters were telling them was based upon solid
facts. It wasn't.

I'd be very interested in hearing the opinion of some neutral lawyers who have studied
all the documents in the case as to the significance of the
government's mistatement.

The filing on
Friday was NOT the start of the case. The lawsuit was filed in 2003. And Ivins
was declared to have been the culprit in 2008.
What was the government saying in 2008? Unfortunately, I wasn't
tracking the case back then. I suppose I could spend the money
and download the Docket and some documents from that time, but what
would they tell me? It's clear that the government has been
arguing all along that it was not negligent.

In fact, after the revelation that Ivins was the killer, the government
was putting up such a strong defense that they couldn't have predicted
what was in the mind of a mentally ill person like Ivins, that Maureen Stevens' lawyers had to change
the premise of their lawsuit. Instead
of arguing that the government was negligent in allowing Ivins to do
what he did, Stevens' lawyers change their premise to arguing that the
government failed to find the actual
killer, and therefore the government was negligent in that they
didn't even know who stole or misused anthrax from their labs.

The only thing that happened on Friday was that the government filed a motion to ask for a Summary Judgment in
the case, i.e., a motion to have the case dismissed because, after Maureen
Stevens' lawyers changed their premise to claim that Ivins was not the anthrax mailer, Stevens'
lawyers no longer had any valid
legal arguments.

But, instead of focusing on the real story - whether or not Maureen
Stevens still has a legal case - the media focused on a one sentence misstatement in one of
the many documents in the filing.
Here's the original statement from Friday's court filings:

28.
USAMRIID did not have the specialized
equipment in a containment laboratory that
would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were
used in the letters.

1.
Defendant’s Statement of Facts [DE#
154-1], paragraph 28, should contain the words “a lyophilizer” instead
of “specialized equipment,” along with clarifying phrases “[a]lthough
USAMRIID had equipment that could be used to dry liquid anthrax in the
same building where anthrax research was conducted” and “in the
specific containment laboratory where RMR-1029 was housed.” For
clarity, paragraph 28 should also omit the phrase “would be required.”

As
corrected, the pertinent statement
provides as follows:

Although
USAMRIID had equipment that could
be used to dry liquid anthrax in the same building where anthrax
research was conducted, USAMRIID did not have a lyophilizer in the
specific containment laboratory where RMR-1029 was housed to prepare
the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.1

And footnote 1 says:

1
Defendant
United States does not seek to imply that a lyophilizer provides the
only means to dry liquid anthrax.

The government's defense in the Stevens' lawsuit says that what Ivins
did was unpredictable.
And, the government can't be held responsible for something that can't
be predicted.

The original misstatement was that Ivins didn't have the required equipment in his lab to
dry the spores. The correction says that he didn't have a lyophilizer in his lab to dry
spores, but there were other ways
he could have dried the spores. Both versions claim Ivins did
something that was unpredictable.

The claims in the media that the government tried to argue that Ivins wasn't the culprit are total
nonsense, since the motion for a Summary Judgment was based upon the
government's claim that they couldn't have predicted what Ivins would
do because he was mentally ill and did things that were totally
unpredictable. Here's the legal claim that concludes the motion
for a Summary Judgment:

Because
Plaintiffs [Stevens] could never
present facts to show that decedent’s inhalation anthraxand the intervening acts
that gave rise to it was “a foreseeable and probable consequence of thewrongful actions of the
defendant,” the government is entitled to summary judgment onproximate cause.

It's Stevens' lawyers who
are now arguing that Ivins wasn't the killer. The
government argued that he was the killer, and his actions were
unpredictable. Friday's misstatment was just a
misstatement. It wasn't an attempt to "obstruct justice."

This whole mess appears to be a manufactured mess
by the media and by people who support the Stevens' lawsuit in an
attempt to obscure the real legal issues in the case. If they can
do that, then maybe the case won't be dismissed.

July 20, 2011 (C)
- There's a hint about what the PBS program "Front Line" is going to be
saying when they air their new "film" about the anthrax attacks in
about 3 months, around the 10th anniversary of the anthrax
attacks. In a
video interview on PBS NewsHour, producer Michael Kirk stated the
government claimed in the Stevens' civil lawsuit that Ivins did not make the attack anthrax in his lab
at USAMRIID. I very seriously doubt that was ever
claimed. Since I've seen no support for it, the statement appears
to be total
nonsense.
If it had been claimed by the government, it would be repeated in all
of the McClatchy "news" reports, the conspiracy theorists and True
Believers would have been trumpeting it everywhere, and there would
have been a lot more than just a corrected misstatement about the
lyophilizer in yesterday's "Notice of Errata."
The PBS interview contains several misstatements by Kirk and by the
interviewer Hari Sreenivasan. However, it looks like nothing more
than taking a very simple misstatement in a court document filed on
Friday and blowing it totally out of proportion. It seems
to be the result of simple carelessness
in their reporting by people who haven't been following the case very
closely. I could be wrong, but I don't see any deliberate
distortions. Nevertheless, my opinion of "Front Line" has been
dramatically lowered.

July 20 & 22, 2011
(B)
- I think it's pretty clear how Ivins dried the spores, but I can say
that because I am not preparing a legal case to take into court.
The DOJ lawyers, on the other hand, cannot
state how Ivins "most likely" dried the attack anthrax, because the
defense would label it as "speculation," and they'd try to create
"reasonable doubt" by showing how the DOJ's "speculation" cannot be conclusively proved. On this
site (and in my book), however, I see no problem with showing what the
evidence says about how Ivins most
likely dried the attack powders:

1.
Ivins probably did not use the
lyophilizer because it was too big to move into his own BSL-3 lab, and
would have contaminated the entire building if use where it was located
- outside Bacteriology Suite 5.2. Ivins probably
did not use the speed-vac, since it is capable of
drying only very tiny amounts at a time, and it would have taken too
many runs to produce the material in the anthrax letters.3. Ivins probably
did not use chemicals to dry the spores, because
the chemicals reportedly leave behind traces, and no such chemical
traces were found in the attack powders.

4. Ivins definitely did
not
use a spray dryer to dry the spores, because USAMRIID had no spray
dryer, and because the media spores were definitely not dried with a spray dryer.

5. Ivins probably did not use
desiccants to dry the spores, although it's known that he knew how to
do it. If he mixed
the spores with a desiccant, there would likely have been some trace
left behind.

6. Ivins
probablyair
dried
the spores, very likely with added heat to make them dry faster.
The attack spores were a light tan color, as opposed to almost pure
white as spores would appear when dried with other methods. One
explanation for the light tan color would be the use of heat when
drying.

There might be other methods that I haven't considered because I'm
unaware of them, but air drying seems the simplest way and the way that
best fits the known facts. It could be highly dangerous, but
Ivins routinely did things that other scientists at USAMRIID considered
to be highly dangerous, like leaving bags of hazardous waste laying
around in his lab for weeks and weeks. Other scientists find that
unbelievably
dangerous, but there are witnesses who say it was routine for
Ivins. Ivins' lab was notorious for being cluttered and unclean,
something else others would consider to be extremely dangerous. Ivins
would juggle knives for the amusement of others. He burglarized sorority houses.
Clearly, he didn't
view risks the same way others view risks, probably because he felt he
had the specialized expertise
they didn't have.

Ivins also knew he could work alone in his lab at
night and on weekends, and no one would ask what he was doing, because
he was accepted as being "eccentric." He was "Bruce being
Bruce." Air drying the amount of spores in a letter could have
taken as little as a couple hours - a tiny fraction of his unexplained
lab time, particularly if a desiccant was used to help dry the
air. There's
nothing secret or mysterious about air drying
spores. Anyone who has
observed a blob of mud turn into a crusty spot of dust knows how it
works. And depending upon
the plates or other surface used, the amount of moisture left in the
spores, desiccant or no desiccant, the temperature of the air, whether
the air is flowing or
still, there is a large variety of ways it can be done. Ivins had
plenty of time to find the right method. There are facts
suggesting he may have been practicing for over a year before the
mailings.

Discussing specific techniques for making dry spores is something else
that government lawyers would be reluctant to do. Someone is just
liable to take the method they describe and use it to create spores for
a new attack. At one time, I thought that the entire subject
would be forbidden for anyone
to discuss out of fear of giving some terrorist information he did not
have. But now all the information is provided in detail all over
the Internet.

NOTE: I added
information about drying with desiccants to the above comment on July
22, 2011.

July 20, 2011 (A)
-
This morning, The New
York Times has an article about the Steven
vs USA lawsuit and
revisions made by the government to some of their court filings.
The government changed the wording in the filings to make the facts
less likely to be incorrectly interpreted. According
to Scott Shane of The Times:

Lawyers for the
department’s civil division wrote in the July 15 filing that the Army’s
biodefense center at Fort Detrick, Md., “did not have the specialized
equipment in a containment laboratory that would be required to prepare the dried
spore preparations that were used in the letters.”
...

What the filing should have said, the department wrote, was that while
the Army lab did not have a lyophilizer, a freeze-drying machine, in
the space where Dr. Ivins usually worked, there was a lyophilizer and
other equipment in the building that he could have used to dry the
anthrax into powder.

The department said the inaccurate initial filing resulted from a
failure of communication between civil division lawyers handling the
lawsuit and the criminal division prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who
spent years investigating the case.

So, it can be viewed that the government misstated their position
regarding the lyophilizer, or that they just didn't use the best
wording. Either way, it changes nothing about the evidence
against Bruce Ivins. And the wording in the filing has been
corrected. The Notice of Errata correcting the
errors is HERE.
The Associated Press's article on the subject has the most accurate
headline to date: "Justice
Dept corrects court filing in anthrax suit." Yawn.

MSNBC, meanwhile, has an article titled "Government
lawyers backtrack on anthrax case," undoubtedly intended to make
the story seem like it's about the goverment changing its mind about the Amerithrax case and not just
about the wording on some court records in the Stevens
case. You have to read the article to see what it really
says:

"We are confident that we
would have proven his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at a criminal
trial, and maintain in the civil suit that the evidence of his guilt
meets the lesser civil standard that it is "more likely than not" that
Dr. Ivins mailed the anthrax attack letters," Boyd said.

Nonetheless, the court documents were seized by
skeptics who have consistently doubted the FBI's conclusions about Ivins.

Yes, indeed.
McClatchy newspaper The
Macon Telegraph calls
the incorrect wording in the court documents a "major
gaffe." And, of course, the correction was a "retraction"
and the simple correcting of bad wording:

Tuesday's retraction came a
day after a collaborative report by McClatchy Newspapers, the Public
Broadcasting System's "Frontline" news magazine and ProPublica, an
investigative newsroom, disclosing what appeared to be an explosive
Justice Department revelation.

And the McClatchy article
also provides the opinions of
a couple "experts" at USAMRIID who evidently have no idea how easy it
would have been for Bruce Ivins to make and dry the attack spores:

While amending the filing,
the Justice Department could not take back what government scientists
had said in sworn depositions.

Stephen Little, a technician
at the Army lab, was asked whether the equipment could have been used
to make the dried spore preparation used in the letters.

"Not any equipment I have
seen," Little replied.

Little said that there was
"no way" Ivins could have moved the lyophilizer to the containment
suite.

"The thing is as big as a
refrigerator," Little said.

Another scientist, Susan
Welkos, said, "We don't have any way to produce the massive amount of
material that would have been necessary to grow up and dry in a way
that wouldn't have killed everybody in the institute."

July 19, 2011 (E)
- The
Fredrick News-Post has an article today about McClatchy
"discovering" the motions filed by the government on
Friday. The article contains a good explanation how the
change in tactics by Maureen Stevens' lawyers changed the tactics of
the government's lawyers and led to them filing for a Summary Judgment
or dismissal:

Dismissing the notion that
Ivins was the killer also negates the lawsuit, the Justice Department
argues, because not
being able to prove who the killer was and what his or her methods were
means the plaintiffs [Stevens] cannot prove where the government showed
negligence.

The other motion to dismiss
the case revolved around the argument that, regardless of
whether Ivins was the real killer, the plaintiffs cannot prove that
USAMRIID policy or procedure, or the breach thereof, led to anthrax
attacks.

There are others who are
also picking up on the "discovery" by McClatchy, which isn't really
much a discovery, unless you've been spending a lot of time looking for
something to twist and distort to make a point. The NTI:Global
Security web site has an article. So do "The
Daily Beast," MainJustice.com,
UPI,
and The
Wall Street Journal. They all seem to be in a competition to
create the most sensational headline for the most trivial of news
stories. It's really a story about how these "news organizations"
just feed off of one another, even when all they have is twisted,
distorted
nonsense.July 19, 2011 (D)
- I just updated my version of the Docket
report in the Stevens v USA lawsuit. What I found was that a
blizzard of docments were filed on Friday July 15, including a motion by the government for a Summary Judgment based upon the
government's claim that Maureen Stevens has no valid legal
argument. The many other documents filed by the government on
Friday relate to a claim by the government that Florida no longer has
any legal jurisdiction in the case.

It's strange that the McClatchy reports do not mention anything about these motions to
dismiss. I looked around for the exact quote that set them off
into their claims about the case against Ivins being hurt because he
couldn't have
used the lyophilzer to make the attack anthrax, but there are just too
many documents to go through. However, on page 11 and 12 of the
motion for a Summary Judgment, I found this information on the same
subject:

Alteration
of the form of the anthrax required
technical equipment that was
not routinely used for that purpose, and the equipment used to prepare the
dried spore preparations that were used in the letters has never beenidentified. .... Even if
the source material had been acquired via government
negligence,the transformation
into a dry powder suitable for letter attacks
is the sort of intervening act which dispels proximate cause.

and

No
one, prior to 2001, could reasonably
expect that the interception or loss
of a liquid solution
containing anthrax spores could lead to someone using
highly specialized equipment
and techniques to profoundly modify the spores
in preparation for their use in the nation’s first deadly attack with a
pathogen. ... The record is
devoid of facts suggesting
that a person could
have reasonably foreseen that government negligence or, for that
matter,
anyone’s negligence, could ever lead to an assailant taking wet anthrax
spores, manipulating them, and using dried and pulverized spores as a
weapon to be sent to specifiedtargets
through the mail.

“It is incumbent upon the courts to place limits on foreseeability,
lest all
remote possibilities be interpreted as foreseeable in the legal sense.”

There's also a new ORDER from Judge Hurley added yesterday that
terminates as "moot"
the Stevens' motion to compell testimony from Dr. Saathoff, who headed
the Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel, which showed that Ivins was
mentally ill for most of his life, but the Army officials at USAMRIID
were totally unaware of it because the psychiatrists' documents were
not available to his employers due to doctor/patient confidentiality
reasons. Stevens' lawyers withdrew their request. That
wasn't mentioned in the McClatchy "news" report, either.

July 19, 2011 (C)
- Although I may be repeating some of what I wrote in earlier comments
today, I'm going to try to summarize the
latest McClatchy "news story" in as few
words as possible:

A few months ago, Maureen
Stevens' lawyers found that they
could
not wintheir
negligence case against the governmentif
Ivins was accepted as being the anthrax mailer. Ivins' employer
(the
government) didn't know Ivins was mentally ill, and Ivins did things
that were totally
unforeseeable by his
employer. That
is a solid defense for the government.

So, because Maureen
Stevens' lawyers saw they could not win with their initial claims, they
changed the premise of their
lawsuit to claim that Bruce Ivins
was NOT the anthrax mailer, and that some other
unidentified person working for
the government sent the anthrax
letters, someone who could be presumed to mentally
sound, who could be presumed to
have used standard government materials and
methods in ways that were totally foreseeable
to create the attack anthrax. It's a difficult legal argument,
but it's the
only somewhat winnable argument Stevens' lawyers had left.

The latest McClatchy
"finding" is that USAMRIID's Bacteriology Division's
lyophilizer could not have been used to dry the attack spores, and
therefore Ivins couldn't be the anthrax killer.

The FBI and DOJ never said
that the lyophilizer must have
been used. They only said it was one of the methods
that could have been used to dry the spores, and Ivins lied
about his ability to use the lyophilizer - in an attempt to keep all
suspicion away from himself.

What I don't understand
about all this is: How could PBS's Frontline be
part of it? Are they still arguing the antiquated conspiracy
theory
that the attack anthrax must have come from a secret and
illegal U.S. government bioweapons lab?July 19, 2011 (B)
- Hmm. Salon.com's columnist, Glenn Greenwald, has just jumped on
the McClatchy
band wagon with a column titled "DOJ
casts serious doubt on its own claims about the attack anthrax."
Greenwald adds nothing, but he thinks the McClatchy finding is
"amazing." Some
journalists are evidently very easily amazed.

July 19, 2011 (A)
-
Uh oh! Looks like I'm not going to get much work done on my book
today. My email inbox this morning is full of messages about the
Amerithax investigation. Yesterday's Boston Herald contained what
seems to be the most complete version of an article titled "Justice
Department lawyers contradict FBI findings in anthrax case."
They seem to have picked up the article from the McClatchy newspaper chain
and PBS's Frontline. McClatchy seems to be on a mission to find
something wrong with the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins.
The article says:

Justice Department lawyers
have acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins’ lab —
the so-called hot suite — didn’t contain the equipment needed to turn
liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through
congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001.

So, it's all about the lyophilizer,
which I just happened to discuss in detail in my (B) comment on
Sunday. Only now it's about the wording of a Justice Department
document, specifically this phrase about Ivins' BSL-3 lab:

"did not have the
specialized equipment ... that would be required to prepare the dried
spore preparations that were used in the letters."

The point I made on Sunday still holds true: "The ... defenders of Ivins merely bring up
the
lyophilizer because it's an argument that supports their beliefs, and
it's a subject they feel they can argue about to justify their
beliefs. The
FBI doesn't say that Ivins [or anyone else must have] used a lyophilizer to
dry the attack
spores."

It's similar to the
McClatchy argument about how the FBI didn't track
down the the Bacillus subtilis
contamination in the media anthrax
letters. It proves nothing, but unexplained findings make
for profitable newspaper
headlines.

Dean Boyd, a Justice
Department spokesman, said Monday that the court filing didn’t
contradict the government’s conclusion that Ivins sent the letters.
Rather, he said, the lawyers merely argued that "Ivins’ actions were
not foreseeable to his supervisors at USAMRIID," because he didn’t have
the equipment to dry the spores in his containment laboratory, "and
thus the United States should not be held liable for his actions."

"To clarify, this statement
was intended to relate to the specific containment laboratory" where
Ivins kept a flask of liquid anthrax with genetic markers similar to
those found in the letters, Boyd said.

So, it is something taken out of
context.
It's what passes for "investigative
journalism" these days. In the Steven vs
USA lawsuit, the government argued that Ivins' actions
weren't foreseeable because he didn't have standard equipment for
drying spores in his BSL-3 lab. Therefore, the government isn't
liable.
They can't be held responsible for a non-standard
and unforeseeable act
committed by an employee.

A few months ago, Maureen Stevens' lawyers, seeing that they had no
case if a mentally
ill person like Ivins was the anthrax mailer, changed their
lawsuit to claim that Dr. Bruce Ivins was not the anthrax mailer, therefore
it was not a mentally ill
person working at USAMRIID (or Battelle) who sent the anthrax
letters. Their new argument is that it was some still unknown
person,
and, thus, the government should have foreseen the possibility of such
a crime. And Stevens' lawyers are using the fact that the
lyophilizer couldn't have been used by Ivins to make the attack anthrax
as evidence to try to persuade a jury that Ivins didn't commit the
anthrax mailings. Someone else
must have done it.

McClatchy and Frontline are using Stevens' arguments about the
lyophilizer to suggest that it means that Ivins couldn't have
dried the spores, and therefore Ivins was innocent. In reality, it means no such
thing. As
I stated on Sunday, the FBI and the DOJ have been arguing all along
that Ivins had other ways of
drying spores. And the evidence says he very likely used one of
those other ways. It doesn't change the case proving that Bruce
Ivins was the anthrax mailer.

McClatchy and Frontline are arguing Maureen Stevens' side of the Stevens vs USA lawsuit that Ivins
wasn't the anthrax mailer and downplaying
the government's side
of the case. It would certainly help sell more newspapers if or
when the lawsuit gets to court. It suggests that the anthrax
killer is still out there somewhere. Scaring people sells
newspapers.

July 18, 2011 (B)
- Hmm. I just re-read what was probably the first interview that
Ivins did with the FBI during the Amerithrax investigation. The
interview took place on November 19, 2001, and it's on page 2 of FBI pdf file # 847443.
In the interview, Ivins is asked about someone else who works at
USAMRIID, and Ivins seems to suggest that person had the knowhow to
send the letters. Using the same techniques I mentioned in my
June 22, 2011 (A) comment, I can see that the person is male, and he
has a last name that consists of 8 letters:

Ivins said XXXXXXXX had access to B.
anthracis, theknowledge
about how to disseminate it, and had unrestricted access to
B. anthracis. Ivins said the labs works
with the bacteria, bacillus anthracis, suspended in
liquid because the powder
form is too dangerous.

Jahrling and Geisbert come immediately to mind, since they were
responsible for all the false information about silicon and bentonite
additives at that time, but they didn't work with anthrax, and the
details Ivins provides to the FBI are about someone who did work with anthrax. People
were beginning to point at Hatfill around that time, but his last name
doesn't have 8 letters, and he didn't work with anthrax, either.
Hmm.

July 18, 2011 (A)
-
This morning, while continuing my research into the happenings at
USAMRIID during November of 2001 (for Chapter 18 of the new book I'm
writing), I came across an interesting email
(in batch
#38, page 19) dated Wednesday, November 28, 2001, from Bruce
Ivins that I probably should have included in my Sunday comment.
But, it should work equally well as a separate comment today.
Here's the email (complete with typos):

From:
Ivins, Bruce E Dr USAMRIIDTo: [Redacted]Subject: Ames strainDate: Wednesday, November
28, 2001 9:24:57 AM
In view of recent comments by [Redacted] and [Redacted] to the press
about the supposed ease
of getting anthrax strains (especially the Ames strain) from [Redacted]
and USAMRIID, perhaps
it should be pointed out to
people that neither of the above individuals got the strain from us.
The
Ames strain was sent to Porton
Down in the mid 1980s. From there, the Brits sent the strain to[Redacted] who, in turn
sent it to [Redacted]. Also,
it should be pointed out that this is not a "Fort Detrick strain."
It was a strain from the USDA National Veterinary Service Laboratory in
Ames, Iowa.
Neither they, nor Iowa State
University (which conveniently
autoclaved all of its
B. anthracis strains in October) are able (or willing) to provide a record
of all the individuals and
institutions that received the Amesstrain from them. We know EXACTLY who received the
Ames strain (and other B. anthracis strains) from us:

The assertion that we basically just provided that strain and other
strains willy-nilly to
whoever
asked for them is incorrect.
Perhaps it should also be pointed out that the biosecurity here at
USAMRIID (keycard access to specificbiocontainment suiets by
specific individuals) has historically been very stringent. In
contrast, thebiosecurity at the labs of
[Redacted] and [Redacted] have only recenly been tightened.
- Bruce

It's an interesting and seemingly very angry email from Ivins. He
not
only continued to insist that the Ames strain came from the USDA's NVSL
division in Ames, but that Iowa State University (ISU) "conveniently"
destroyed their strains, presumably in a conspiracy to avoid having their
strains
checked for a match to the attack strain. And Ivins suggests that
both the NSVL and ISU refuse
to provide a list of who received the Ames strain from them. The
fact that they never had the
Ames strain, therefore could not possibly have such a list,
didn't fit into Ivins' "Believing Brain." His crime depended upon
the Ames strain being commonly used and untraceable, and he truly
believed that the Ames strain came from the USDA. If
the USDA wouldn't provide the list that Ivins so thoroughly believed they must have, then they must be withholding the
list to protect themselves. The concept of being wrong about such a key part to
his plan just wasn't comprehensible, so there must be a conspiracy to hide
the truth. He was beginning to imagine
that the NSVL and ISU were conspiring
in some way to lead the investigation away from themselves. And
Ivins wasn't going to let that happen, since, if the investigation
couldn't be pointed toward the NSVL and ISU, it would have to point
back at USAMRIID.

The fact that Ivins stated that USAMRIID kept very exact records undoubtedly came back
to haunt him later.

July 17, 2011 (B)
- These days, you can often go
on-line and scan through a book for a subject of
interest before actually buying the book. Using that technology,
I scanned
Michael Shermer's book "The
Believing Brain" for the word "anthrax," and found no mention of
the subject. So, the book doesn't fit my immediate
interest, it only fits with my general interest in psychology -
specifically the psychology of conspiracy theorists and True
Believers. On those subjects, the book's introduction includes a
few worthwhile passages. Here's one:

Once beliefs are formed,
the
brain begins to look for and find
confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an
emotional boost of
further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process
of
reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive
feedback loop
of belief confirmation.

and another:

Belief reversals happen
more
often in science, but not at all as
frequently as we might expect from the idealized visage of the exalted
"scientific method" where only the facts count. The reason for
this is that scientists are people, too, no less subject to the
whims of emotion and the pull ofcognitive biases to shape and reinforce
beliefs.

Thus, when we hear about the beliefs of others that differ from our
own, we are naturally inclined to dismiss or dismantle their beliefs as
nonsense, evil or both.

One example of scientists showing bias is the way USAMRIID friends of
Bruce Ivins argue that Ivins couldn't have been the anthrax killer
because he couldn't have dried the spores using the lyophilizer.
That example showed up again in the
June 7 deposition of Stephen Little, a USAMRIID scientist who
was deposed in the Stevens v USA case:

The piece of equipment that
the
FBI identified initially as a lyophilizer sits outside my laboratory in
B5 [Bacteriology Suite #5]. There's
no way that he could by
himself pushed that thing down to BSL3, put it in an airlock, take it
out of the airlock, push it down to a laboratory. The thing is as
big as a refrigerator. He would have had to pick it up,
that
part, to prevent contamination of the entire suite. He could not
have done than and put that part in a biological safety cabinet.
It's too big.

And, he goes on and on about how Ivins couldn't have used a lyophilizer
to dry the attack spores, with the implication that that somehow proves
Ivins' innocence.

It doesn't, of course. It just
argues that Ivins probably didn't dry the spores by using a lyophilizer.
That was established the first time someone argued that drying anthrax
spores in the lyophilizer it was next to
impossible without contaminating large parts of Building 1425.

Plus, the light tan color of the Daschle and Leahy spores tends to
indicate that the spores were air
dried by applying heat. A
lyophilizer works by applying a near vacuum to freeze-dry
materials.

The FBI's main point about the lyophilizer was that Ivins lied about his knowledge of
it. He repeatedly claimed he was no expert on the subject, but
facts showed that he was the
official custodian of the lyophilizer, and he taught others how
to use it. It was one of several ways
Ivins knew how to dry spores. So, any argument that Bruce Ivins
didn't know how to dry spores is totally
false. The USAMRIID defenders of Ivins merely bring up
the
lyophilizer because it's an argument that supports their beliefs, and
it's a subject they feel they can argue about to justify their
beliefs. The
FBI doesn't say that Ivins used a lyophilizer to dry the attack
spores. The
FBI Summary Report says on page 15:

Even if the perpetrator
stole a
quantity of liquid Ames anthrax slurry, it would still have been
necessary to dry the anthrax in order to produce a product like the one
recovered from the envelopes. This drying procedure would have required
either
the type of laboratory equipment, such as a lyophilizer or speed-vac
system, that was present in each of the 15 labs, or
considerable time and space to air-dry.

and on page 30:

Drying anthrax spores
requires
either a sophisticated drying machine called a lyophilizer, a
speed-vac, or
a great deal of time and space to let the spores air-dry – that is, to
allow the water to evaporate – in the lab.

When I read Stephen Little's deposition, I also had to wonder why he
believed that Ivins would have had to take the lyophilizer through the
B3 airlock to get it into
his BSL-3 lab. The B3 airlock was located next to the Animal
Resources corridor. Why
couldn't Ivins have simply rolled the lyophilizer in through the
regular
door? Did
the airlock have oval-shaped pressure doors with sealing levers like
those on typical airlocks and in submarines? Was Mr. Little
using
that kind of pressure door to construct an impossiblity to support
his beliefs, or is there something about the "regular" doors that I'm
not aware of that prevents a lyophilizer from being brought in that
way? (In the Building 1425 floorplan HERE,
I put a red question mark on the B3 airlock.)

I've been very curious about the physical location of doors, key-card
readers and
rooms since I tried to figure out what the in-out logs showed about the
locations of doors, which resulted in me being provided with the
floorplan to Building 1425. (But I still can't figure out
where the card-readers were.)

Last week, I unexpectedly confirmed that the Building 1425 suite where
John Ezzell was accumulating evidence in the case, and where the FBI
repository was apparently located, was Animal Assessment Suite 3.
I'd previously made a tentative conclusion to that effect when I
noticed that one of the eight Ames samples that had the same four
mutations as the attack anthrax was found in the "AA3
Cold Room." Last week, I noticed that on page 180 of
Richard Preston's book " The Demon In the Freezer," it says:

The FBI began delivering
about
two hundred forensic samples a day to USAMRIID, frequently in
Hueys. Choppers were coming in day and night on a pad near the
building. MHRU agents and
other FBI Laboratory people began to work inside suite AA3, which ended up
being
dedicated entirely to forensic analysis and processing samples.

I came across that passage as I was assembling information in
chronological order in an attempt to understand what the thinking was
at specific times during the early days of the Amerithrax
investigation. Last week,
I was trying to figure out exactly how the thinking went from believing
that the Ames strain was a common strain used thousands of labs all
around the world to knowing that
the Ames strain was a rare
strain used in only about 15 labs. The change in thinking
appears to have taken place during November of 2001. During that
November, the tracking down of the
source of the attack anthrax changed from being "impossible" to being
"very probable".

At the beginning of that November in 2001, Bruce Ivins and others at
USAMRIID were
a reporter's sources for an article
printed
in the November 12 issue of the New
Yorker titled "How a sick
cow in Iowa may have helped to create a
lethal bioweapon," by Peter J. Boyer. The issue was
available for sale a week earlier, on November 5, and the article was
also distributed
around USAMRIID on November 5 via emails. The article described
how the academics at Iowa State University had decided to destroy their
collection of anthrax samples after the media began hounding them, even
though they had nothing called "The Ames Strain" and there was no
chance that anything in the collection was connected to the anthrax
attacks. The article then went into a string of conjectures about
the finding of the sick cow, the collecting of a specimen, disposing of
the cow, and how, in 1980 or 1981, USAMRIID requested interesting
anthrax
samples from the USDA, and the USDA's National
Veterinary
Services Laboratory (NVSL) in Ames sent to USAMRIID the cultures that
would become the center of the current investigation.

The fact that the article claimed the NVSL did something they did not do undoubtedly rankled people
at the USDA and its NVSL division. The article also ridiculed the
chief of
the
Department of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, for thinking
that the Bob Stevens in Florida case was not an act of
terrorism. But, the article probably got the most attention
because of what it said about the attack spores being weaponized:

The fact that it was
weaponized means that the powder contained not only anthrax
spores but the anti-caking
material that allows the spores to float free. Identifying that
material --which has been described as a fine, brownish particulate --
could help to pinpoint the source.

And

In announcing the
discovery that an anti-cling agent had been added to the anthrax
sent through the mail, intelligence officials declared that only three
nations in the world had the capacity to weaponize anthrax in that
manner: the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Iraq. According
to the Washington Post, an unnamed
government official also said that "the totality of the evidence in
hand suggests that it is unlikely that the spores were originally
produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq."

But, most of all:

In a
sense, Army scientists at USAMRIID
have, in recent years,
"weaponized" the Ames strain whenever they have tested anthrax vaccines
on monkeys. They make an aerosol of the Ames strain, spray it into the
monkeys' containment area, and await the results.

The New Yorker article acknowledge that USAMRIID scientists claimed
they destroyed all leftovers after completing their tests, so they
didn't leave any "weaponized" anthrax laying around for someone to
steal. But the article didn't distinguish between the wet spray
that was injected directly into the mouth of test animals at USAMRIID,
versus the dry spores floating in the air that are the true
characteristics of militarized, "weaponized" anthrax on a battlefield.

I've been going through the
emails Ivins sent and received during this period (mostly from Batch
#37)
to get a sense of the reaction to the New Yorker article and whether or
not it led to the change of thinking about how common the Ames
strain was. I started writing about it for this comment,
but it
became so long and complicated that I had to put it aside for further
research, study and condensation. The point I'm trying to make
here and now is that it was still believed at the time of the New
Yorker
article that the Ames strain was widely distributed and virtually
impossible to trace to any specific lab, since thousands of labs were
believed to have samples.
Just three weeks later, however, a November 25, 2001 article in The
Washington Post
titled "Deadly
Anthrax Strain Leaves a Muddy Trail" described a
very different understanding:

Once
thought to be accessible to thousands of
researchers, the strain now appears to have circulated in only a small
universe of laboratories. One of its main distributors,
according to
scientists, was the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., which used Ames to test
vaccines that could protect U.S. troops in case of a biological attack.

and

When the attacks began, there was speculation
that thousands of labs might have had access to Ames, but that number
has been knocked down by anthrax experts. Philip C. Hanna, a
microbiologist at the University of Michigan, said: "I'd put it . . .
between 10 and 24."

Paul
Keim, who has done genetic mapping of anthrax strains at Northern
Arizona University and is reportedly assisting the FBI with the
investigation, said he was uncertain of the number of labs with Ames
but described it as "a pretty small
list" that he thought was "very
discoverable."

Paul Keim's collection of over 2,000 anthrax samples was undoubtedly
key to the realization that the Ames strain was NOT widely distributed
and that USAMRIID did most or all of the distribution of the Ames
strain. All the samples of the Ames strain in Keim's collection
came directly or indirectly from USAMRIID. So, scientists at
USAMRIID
seemed to be in a position to know everyone - or almost everyone - who
had the Ames strain.

Martin Hugh-Jones, an anthrax expert at
Louisiana State University who maintains a global database of anthrax
outbreaks for the World Health Organization, concurred that it was
relatively simple in the past to obtain anthrax cultures from USAMRIID.

"They kept the stuff there, and if you needed a culture, you called up
Art" -- Col. Arthur Friedlander, USAMRIID's senior military research
scientist, Hugh-Jones said.
....

"Basically, if some guy's got this culture on
his dirty clothes or on his bench top, he'll have some explaining to
do," said Hugh-Jones. "It's like
owning a pistol that was used in a homicide."

That last comment by
Hugh-Jones was very prescient. However, at
that same time (and in the same article), it is made clear
that the media (and possibly the FBI investigators) still incorrectly
believed the
Ames strain originally came
from somewhere around Ames, Iowa:

Only a few
facts have been clearly established. The strain of Bacillus anthracis that became known as Ames was first
isolated decades ago from a diseased cow near Ames. A natural or
"wild" strain, Ames was recognized relatively early for its virulence
and for its ability to resist vaccines.

They didn't know what they didn't know. They didn't know the
source of the Ames strain. They only believed they knew. And Bruce
Ivins was still arguing in January of
2002 that it "most certainly did" come from Iowa, even after The
Washington Post reported that it came from Texas:

From:
Ivins, Bruce E Dr USAMRIIDSent: Tuesday, January 29,
2002
7:23 AMTo: [Redacted]Cc: [Redacted]Subject: RE: Message on
Ames
StrainImportance: HighEveryone,We most certainly DID get
the
"Ames strain" from the USDA, Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Services, National Veterinary Services Laboratories, P.O. Box 844,
Ames, Iowa 50010. We have a Xerox copy of the original
mailing label from them. Also, to our good fortune, we
([Redacted] actually) [Redacted] We can supply you with the
actual strain number (put on it by the NVSL labs) if desired. I have
tried repeatedly, without success, to talk to [probably Gregory R.
Knudson] about this. He is at AFRRI and has failed to return my calls.
He can be reached at [Redacted].

Again,
if you would like
the
specific number on the strain that is on the slant, please let me know.
I remember it coming from Iowa, however. About the same time that we
received the Ames strain, we received the "Texas" strain from
[Redacted] at Texas A&M.Let me know if there's
more info
that we can provide.Bruce

I just spoke on the phone
with
[probably Gregory Knudson] at AFRRI. He is going to FAX me whatever
information he has on the Ames strain. He told me that the strain was
definitely sent to him from the NVSL
in Ames, Iowa. He also said that
it is possible that the actual case (dead cow) may have been in Texas,
and that the strain may have then gone from Texas to Ames, Iowa, and
then to [probably Knudson]. If that is the case, then USAMRIID is third
in line
as far the origin of the "Ames strain," and we have no idea as to where
the Texas lab or the NVSL
in Ames sent the strain. I will keep everyone
informed on this as soon as I get more information from [probably
Knudson].- Bruce

Since the only signature
on the letter that was sent along with the sample
from
Texas was "TVMDL" and not "NVSL," one has to wonder if Knudson
was simply assuming that
TVMDL was just some division of NVSL, and he never
bothered to figure out what the acronym really meant. (The strain
number ("Ames 255414B") Ivins mentioned in the first email above
doesn't get any hits via Google, and it doesn't appear in the letter
from Texas A&M. But, in later emails Ivins used it when
describing the "ancestor" Ames samples USAMRIID received from Texas
A&M in 1981. The number was evidently assigned by Knudson at
the same time that he gave the strain the name "Ames strain.")

For Ivins, his reaction is another example of him trying to create
facts to
fit his beliefs or his wishes. It was an example of "Consciousness of Guilt." If Bruce
Ivins had been innocent of the
crimes, it shouldn't have mattered one bit to him whether the Ames
strain came from Iowa or Texas or Afghanistan, nor whether it was a
rare strain or a
common strain. But, because the facts were now saying that the
common, untraceable strain he thought
he had used in the anthrax letters was
actually a
rare, very traceable strain used primarily by USAMRIID, his "Believing
Brain" was looking for ways to make the facts fit with what he wanted
to be true.

In other emails, even after it was conclusively
shown that the Ames strain came from a Texas cow and never went
anywhere near Ames, Iowa, Ivins was still arguing that the Ames strain
could be available in numerous labs under some different name which
people just
didn't
realize it was the Ames strain. And one of those incorrectly
named
samples could have been used for the letters.

That
kind of argument goes beyond what "The Believing Brain" does. It
shows
what a guilty person does when he tries to mislead investigators away
from actual evidence that could lead to his arrest. (Paul Keim's
testing eliminated the possibility of another strain also being called
"the Ames strain.")

It appears that Ivins continued to argue relentlessly that the Ames
strain could have been
sent from Texas to other labs, even to the USDA in Iowa. And his
continuing arguments evidently started to irk his superiors. In a
February
6,
2002 email, Ivins stated in an email with the subject "A possible
discussion":

I'll be
happy to give you my
personal opinion, but it can't be posted because "we speak with one
voice" here, and I am not that voice.

Evidently, someone in
authority had
told Ivins to shut up.
And, both amusingly and significantly, Ivins signed the email:
"Bruce (We don't make anthrax spore powder at
USAMRIID) Ivins," another indicator of how desperate he was to turn the
spotlight away from USAMRIID and himself.

By that time, the investigation was beginning to focus on collecting
samples from every lab which possessed the Ames strain, something that
had once seemed an impossible task. In February of
2002
it had become both straight-forward and the obvious thing to do.
The
FBI's collecting of Ames evidence samples was already in progress in
Suite AA3. And, in a matter of days, Ivins would be asked to
provide samples of Ames from his lab and from flask RMR-1029.July 17, 2011 (A)
- This morning's Philadelphia Inquirer contains a
review of David Willman's book "The Mirage Man."
It's a relatively positive review, with only a few minor
complaints. The reviewer (Paul Jablow) didn't like the title, and
he doesn't think the anthrax attacks paid a very big role in setting
America on a path to war with Iraq:

The thrust of the book's
main argument is compelling, but Willman may get on thin ice by
overstating the importance of the attacks in "America's rush to war."
They may have contributed to the bellicose atmosphere and panic in
Washington, but it is hard to believe that the Bush administration
would have been less eager to invade Iraq had they not occurred.

As expected, this reviewer also spends a lot of time talking about the
"investigation" of Steven Hatfill. But he has no difficulty accepting that the
FBI finally identified the right man when they prepared to indict Bruce
Ivins:

If Ivins is the perfect
villain for a story like this (think Norman Bates with lab privileges),
the only ones resembling heroes are the handful of FBI agents who
slowly turned the bureau's attention away from Hatfill. It was like
turning a bureaucratic ocean liner, and they never got any real
recognition.

The title of the review is
"Bungled pursuit of a killer." That title reflects both Willman's
and the reviewer's opinion of how the case was handled. In the
Grand Scheme of Things, however, the fact that the killer was finally
identified means it was not
bungled. To claim the Amerithrax case was "bungled" is like
claiming that America's exploration of the moon was "bungled," because
in the beginning there were numerous failures of test rockets, some
astronauts were actually killed, one attempt to land on the moon
totally failed, those astronauts were almost killed, too, and there
still seems to be thousands of conspiracy theorists who do not believe
that Americans ever did actually land on the moon.

July 13, 2011 -
Hmm. I was just sent a link to what appears to be a
review in Vanity Fair of a
new book on the subject of whether or not any foreign government
was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

But, I did a scan for the word "anthrax," and it didn't appear on any
of the seven pages. Plus, the conspiracy theorists
typically argue that the U.S. government was behind the attacks, not
some foreign government. So, the article is going into a queue
for things I need to look at when I get some free time - perhaps next
year.

Far ahead in my reading queue is the book "The
Believing Brain" by Michael Shermer, which was discussed on The
Colbert Report on Monday night. Shermer described how
our brains are more like lawyers than scientists. We look for
facts to support our beliefs, not for facts about what is actually
true. In other words, it explains why conspiracy theorists and
True Believers believe what they believe, and why they ignore facts
which show them to be wrong.

July 10, 2011
- Probably because there hasn't been any new Amerithrax-related
information lately, discussions about the anthrax attacks seem to be
dying out.Dr.
Meryl Nass appears to have moved on to a new conspiracy theory that
the United
States Government was a "major participant" in some kind of plot
to frame Dominique Strauss-Kahn for rape.

Let me make clear, I do not
condone rape. This case interests me simply because it was
handled so differently from the usual case of diplomats gone wrong,
such as in a vehicular homicide, or the aforementioned incident in
Pakistan. Who denied Strauss-Kahn the niceties that
normally accompany his position, and why? That is the
interesting question here, and media have failed to ask it.

I hate to say "I told you
so" but here it is, from the NY Times. Now one may ask, why was
DSK presumed guilty and treated abominably at the onset of the case?
Still think this was not a political frame-up in which the
USG was a major participant?

My feeling is that the NYC
police are well versed in maintaining confidentiality in other cases
involving celebrities and diplomats. In the case of DSK, the police
created a public circus, made it appear he was fleeing the country due
to guilt, and cooperated with a major media blitz.

It seems most likely that the
order for the police to act in this manner came from levels above those
in NYC.

Meryl

So, if I correctly understand Dr. Nass's reasoning, she believes that
the NYC police are unfailingly courteous to foreign diplomats.
And the media are unfailingly kept ignorant of crimes by foreign
diplomats. Thus, because the media learned of the alleged rape
and Strauss-Kahn's attempt to flee, it must have
been a U.S. government
plot. In Dr. Nass's world, the media never learns about such
things unless the U.S.
government allows it to
happen.

Dr. Nass also wonders why the media failed to ask why they were allowed to learn of such
things. She seems to believe that the media is incapable of
uncovering such juicy stories for themselves. Yet, Dr. Nass
believes the media should have no difficulty uncovering how and why the
U.S. government gave the story to them without the media realizing
where the story came from.

Things are always very clear and simple in the world of conspiracy
theorists.

Meanwhile, on Lew
Weinstein's web site, there seems to be some
agreement among the Truthers that the FBI will never admit an
error in the Amerithrax case, so they feel there's no reason to
continue to call for a new investigation
into who "really" sent the anthrax letters. One Truther says:

There
has been an absence of investigative reporting in this matter.
The occasional reporter would channel leaks from law enforcement but
that was part of the problem, not the solution.

So enjoy the summer and give
up any
hope Amerithrax will be reopened.

Again the
complaint is that the media failed to verify the beliefs of the
conspiracy theorists.

Of course, I completely
disagree that there "has
been an absence of investigative reporting in this matter." I
think the Amerithrax case will go down in history as an extreme example of bad
"investigative reporting." "Investigative reporters" were
responsible for distributing the total nonsense that the attack
spores were weaponized with bentonite. "Investigative
reporters" were responsible for distributing the total nonsense
that Iowa State University was the source of Ames strain.
"Investigative reporters" were largely responsible for distributing the
total
nonsense that Steven Hatfill was the anthrax mailer.
"Investigative reporters" continue to be responsible for distributing
the total nonsense that it was
really the FBI who fingered Hatfill, not conspiracy theorists,
politicians and "investigative reporters." "Investigative
reporters" were responsible for the total
nonsense reports that the Bacillus
subtilis contamination somehow suggests Bruce Ivins wasn't
behind the anthrax attacks. "Investigative reporters" are
responsible for continuing to distribute the total nonsense that the attack
spores were weaponized with silicon.

"Investigative
reporters" were mostlyobstructions to the truth in
their reporting of the Amerithrax investigation. They fed the conspiracy theorists
instead of separating solid facts from nonsensical conspiracy
theories. I say "mostly," because there were a few investigative
reporters who didn't jump on any of the passing band wagons, but those
reporters didn't find many (if any) solid new facts about the case
prior the the death of Bruce Ivins. And, in some ways, that's a
good thing, because, if they had found out about Ivins' lies,
his destruction of evidence, burglaries and other terrible acts, we
probably would have had an attempted lynching of Bruce Ivins in addition to
the attempted lynching of Steven Hatfill.

*

Because things were so slow last week, I found time to check into
what was happening in the Stevens vs the
United States lawsuit. Maureen Stevens' lawyers are now
arguing that Ivins was not the
anthrax mailer, and, therefore, Maureen Stevens still has a claim that
there was
negligence on the part of the government in allowing someone else to steal the anthrax.
(Ivins' motives
were his own
and, according to the defense, there was nothing the government could
have done to stop a lone, trusted, individual employee like Ivins from
stealing and using government materials for his own purposes.) Stevens'
lawyers are
arguing that the government is asking them to prove that Ivins did not do it.
Maureen Stevens' lawyers are basing their claims on the fact that some
people at USAMRIID do not believe
that Ivins was the anthrax killer. It's the Truther argument -
Beliefs overrule facts - on a
different forum. If Ivins' boss doesn't
believe that Ivins did it, then the facts don't matter, Ivins was
innocent. And it's
up to the government to show how it's impossible
for anyone except Ivins to have done it. The government, of
course, disagrees and both sides are looking for a ruling from the
judge.

Meanwhile, they are deposing "witnesses." On June 7th, one
deposed witness, Peter Jahrling of
USAMRIID admitted that it appeared that others may have had access to
the contents of flask RMR-1029. But, he also said:

I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever based on the forensic evidence
that the seed material that
ultimately resulted in that powder came from that flask, whatever it was.I just know what I read but I've heard very compelling
arguments from the FBI, openly
presented, that, you know, my understanding
is that the fingerprint was that thecontents of that
flask was
actually a mixture. It wasn't
pure anthrax or maybe it was pure anthrax but they were different strengths of anthrax,
anyway. So somebody who had
the original A-strain of anthrax would not have come up with something that had
the exact composition that was
both in the flask and spores. That's pretty close to a frigging smoking
gun as far as I'm concerned.
Okay?
That doesn't mean
that the
powder came from that flask.
What it does mean is that the starter material for making the powder came from
that flask. So I don't
think there's any doubt that you can trace the thread back to that flask. But how many
generations
it went
through, where it might have gone, I don't know what that flask was even being
maintained for, to be honest
with you. But, um, you know, my understanding
is that that material was being used tosend out to
laboratories
that were developing diagnostic
tests and what have you and the contents of that flask could have been transferred
totally legitimately to
another party.
So, you know, and I've always
maintained that just because it
came from that flask didn't, doesn't mean that
Bruce Ivins did it. But, you know, if you combine the
circumstantial evidence and all of that with that flask
I think if it had gone to a jury trial he would have
been convicted. That's just my speculation.

So, if Maureen Stevens'
lawyers want to go with beliefs instead of with facts, there is now
another witness - a person who knew Ivins well - who believes that Ivins would have been
found guilty if he hadn't escaped justice by committing suicide.

*

Coincidentally, escaping justice by being found "not guilty" was a big
part of the news
last week, and I kept waiting for some Anthrax Truther to bring up
verdict in the Casey
Anthony murder trial. In
the past several days, I've
probably heard people on TV say a dozen times, "The fact that Casey
Anthony was found "not guilty" does NOT mean she was actually
innocent." Right-O.
I wasn't among the half of Americans who followed the case
closely, but, it was hard to totally avoid. It was on
the TV when I was at the health club, and parts of it were on every
other news program. According to one
source:

Jurors in the Casey Anthony
trial
were said to be “sick to their stomachs” after acquitting Anthony of
killing her 2-year old daughter, Caylee.

Was their decision right? Or
were
they wrong? Or were they just doing their job?

"I did
not
say she was innocent," juror [#3] Jennifer Ford said to ABC News. "I
said
there was not enough evidence. If you
cannot prove what the crime was,
you cannot determine the punishment."

The prosecution didn't know how
Caylee Anthony died or when
the crime was committed.
According to another
source:

Jennifer
Ford, who spoke exclusively to ABC News, believes that prosecutors
could have won a guilty verdict if they had brought a lesser charge
than first degree murder, which carried the possibility of the
death penalty, for the death of 2-year-old Caylee Anthony.

"If
they charged her with other things, we probably could have gotten a
guilty verdict, absolutely," Ford said today on "Good Morning
America." "But not for death, not for first-degree murder. That's a
very substantial charge."

and

During the trial, Judge
Belvin
Perry sealed the juror's names from public view and today he kept them
sealed despite requests from four Florida media organizations and the
Associated Press to make them public.

"I
feel for individuals who simply wanted to do their civic duty," the
judge said. "Our landscape in this country has changed. People have no
reservation…about walking up to an individual, pulling a gun or
knife….and because they disagree with them, hurt them or kill them."

Experts are saying that the jury didn't see a lot of "evidence"
that TV audiences saw, because the "evidence" on TV was ruled
inadmissible. But, the fact that Casey Anthony didn't tell
anyone that her daughter was missing for over a month means she knew something she never told the police.

I keep trying to make some comparison
between the Casey Anthony trial and the case against Bruce Ivins.
But, the only comparison I can find is that, if there had been a trial
and Ivins had been found to be "not guilty," it wouldn't mean that
Ivins didn't commit the crime. It would just mean that the
prosecution failed to convince the jury that he did it.

I don't expect humans to have
perfect judgment every time all the time. And I don't expect
every criminal to leave behind indisputable evidence of his or her
guilt. I just know that
in the vast majority of trials, the right
thing happens. And very often the right thing happens even though
mistakes of all kinds were made by everyone involved.

The one thing the Amerithrax investigation has most clearly proved is
that everybody makes
mistakes.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, June 3, 2011, thru Saturday, July 9, 2011

July 3-4, 2011
- Last week was the quietest week I've had in a long time. For
most of June, I'd
almost become accustomed to writing multiple comments every day.
But, last week there seemed to be nothing new or worthwhile to write
about.
One Anthrax Truther continues feverishly posting to Lew
Weinstein's
blog while also sending me occasional emails about his latest
"findings," but his findings are all so far removed from any relevance
to
anything of interest to me that I saw nothing to comment
upon. He might as well have been ranting about the price of
apple cider in Argentina. The Truther,
of course, must somehow see it all as relevant,
but he
cannot explain how or why
it is relevant. Apparently, it's just relevant because it's
something he has found.
And, if it's
relevant to him, then it obviously should be relevant to everyone else
in the world.

So, I've had lots of time to do research and work on my book.
Some of what I found may not be clearly relevant to the Amerithrax
investigation, either, but I can explain why it's interesting and why it might be
relevant.

For example, while looking for some information in David Willman's book
"The
Mirage Man," I found this very interesting paragraph on the bottom of
page
64 and continuing into page 65:

Ivins's preoccupation with
[Mara]
Linscott had included his sending her packages under false names.
Once he mailed her a soccer jersey in the name of Mia Hamm, the U.S.
Olympic team star. Ivins on another occasion used the name of the
shortstop Derek Jeter to send Linscott paraphernalia of the New York
Yankees, which he knew was her favorite baseball team. He
posed as "Laundry Boy" to send her detergent, postmarked
from Virginia. He did these things in part to test whether
Linscott could "decode" the identity of the sender.

That paragraph is interesting, of course, because it brings to mind the
contents of the so-called J-Lo letter,
which also included a small
box of detergent sent to a woman.

I couldn't help but wonder: Is it just a "coincidence" that Ivins once
sent
a box of detergent to Mara Linscott and someone also sent a box of
detergent to Jennifer Lopez
in September of
2001? Is it really that common for men to send boxes of
detergent to women they are attracted to? And how many make the
detergent boxes a part of a puzzle?

The problem with the passage from Willman's book was: There was no date associated with the mailing
of the
detergent to Mara Linscott. So, it seemed very likely to have
been
done after the anthrax
mailings and after Ivins had read in the National Enquirer that it
was
suspected that the anthrax spores that killed Bob Stevens had arrived
at AMI in a letter addressed to Jennifer Lopez c/o The Sun. Then
it wouldn't really be a "coincidence." It would be a reference.

I pondered the
"clue" or message that Ivins wanted Linscott to decode. I
came up with a possible interpretation:

Detergent sent with love letter to
Jennifer Lopez, + Detergent sent to Linscott, = Ivins sends love to
Linscott?

Having concluded it was just another example of Bruce Ivins'
creepy quirkiness, I decided to move on, and I dismissed the
"coincidence" as
just another weird but irrelevant action by Ivins.

Then, while doing some research for something else, I stumbled across more information
about that "Laundry Boy" mailing. It's on page 61 of the
FBI Summary Report. Here's what I found:

Dr. Ivins also liked to send “care packages” and other items in the
mail, while disguising his identity in an effort to have the recipient
– frequently [Mara Linscott] – “decode” who the sender was. For
example, in an e-mail sent to [Linscott] on March 13, 2001, Dr. Ivins
made the following reference to a series of packages he had sent her: “The detergent from Laundry Boy was
mailed from Virginia during an IPT meeting. The gift
certificate
and birthday card were mailed from Gaithersburg. The jacket –
when it
finally came – was to be mailed from Gettysburg, but you had already
figured out who sent you everything else, so I just went ahead and sent
it from Frederick.”

Wow!Ivins sent the box of
detergent to Mara Linscott before the anthrax mailings and before the J-Lo package was mailed.
And he sent Linscott other
objects which he wanted her to decode.

Now I really had to wonder
if the two different mailings of boxes of detergent to women were just
a
coincidence.

If it's not a coincidence, it could
mean that Ivins sent the J-Lo
letter. That would really set off the True Believers who
are absolutely certain that the J-Lo letter contained anthrax, and that
the love letter inside proposing to Jennifer Lopez contained secret
codes
indicating
it was sent by al Qaeda.

That same page 61 in the FBI Summary Report continues with this:

Finally,
Dr. Ivins’s own words demonstrated that he enjoyed playing
detective and unlocking secrets. In an e-mail to [Linscott] on June 26,
2000, he wrote:

For
me, it’s a real thrill to make a discovery, and know that I’ve just
revealed something that no one else in the world ever knew before. I
feel like a detective, and that which is unknown dares me to try to
find out about it, to decipher its code, to understand it, to fit it
into the puzzle or “Big Picture.”

The facts say that Ivins not only liked to play detective, he liked to
create puzzles for other people to solve.

If Bruce Ivins did send the
J-Lo letter - and I'm not saying
he did - what did the other puzzling contents of the letter mean or
represent? According to an article
in The National Enquirer, the
so-called
"letter" was actually "a bulky manila envelope" which contained:

1. A metal cigar
tube
with a cheap cigar inside.

2. An empty can of chewing
tobacco.

3. A small detergent carton.

4. A handwritten letter to
Jennifer Lopez that was described this way:

The writer said how much
he
loved her and asked her
to marry
him. The letter also contained some sexual innuendo.

It was a business-size
sheet of
stationery decorated with
pink and blue
clouds around the edges. It was
folded into three sections, and in the
middle was a pile of what looked like pink-tinged talcum powder.

Buried in the powder was "a
little Star of David with a
little loop
for a string or chain."

So, there are at least three
connections to Ivins in the J-Lo letter: (1) mailing a box of
detergent, (2) folding the letter into three sections (the
pharmaceutical fold), and (3) the fact that there appears to have been
some kind of "hidden message" in the J-Lo letter, since there is no
known explanation for the tobacco items, the detergent or the Star of David pendant.
And, it's also known that Ivins was a regular reader of the National
Enquirer, which is a sister publication of
The Sun. Ivins sent an anthrax letter to the National Enquirer a
week or so
after the J-Lo letter was mailed to the Sun. And there are
probably other - more tenuous - connections.

Could the J-Lo letter
have been another letter
written by Ivins
containing another hidden
message to another
woman? Just how common is it for mentally disturbed
men to send
boxes of
detergent to women they secretly love or admire? If it's common,
what does
the
laundry detergent symbolize? The brand of detergent could
be an important part of the "code" (All? Biz? Cheer? Era? Fab? Gain?
Tide?), or "Laundry Boy" might have some special meaning to either
Ivins or Linscott or both. Did Ivins joke around about doing
Linscott's
laundry for her? Whatever Ivins was trying to do or
say, the detergent letter was a coded message of some kind to
Linscott, and he also put a hidden message
in
the anthrax letters sent to the media, plus he put information
about himself in
the return address on the senate anthrax letters.

Damn! It's
like so many other things about the Amerithrax case:
There's no way to figure out every detail, and while the unsolved
mysteries
aren't likely to show that anyone but Bruce Ivins sent the anthrax
letters, it would still be nice to know exactly what everything meant.

It seems somewhat unlikely
that
Ivins sent the J-Lo letter. Not very
unlikely. Just unlikely. Or maybe it's simply
unbelievable. It's certainly not
unbelievable that Ivins would do such a thing. It's just
unbelievable that a piece of the Amerithax puzzle that has been argued
about for so many years could have such an obvious and simple
solution. I'd
figure the certainty level that Ivins sent the J-Lo letter at maybe 20%
or 25% (compared with a 99.9% certainty that Ivins sent the anthrax
letters). As far as I can
recall,
Ivins
never mentioned Jennifer Lopez anywhere else. But, in later
years he had a bizarre fascination
with a woman he saw on the TV show "The Mole" - Kathryn Price.
What other women was he fascinated with? Was there an article
about Lopez in The Sun in early 2001? Or maybe Ivins had just
seen Jennifer Lopez as a U.S. Marshal in "Out of Sight," in
which
George Clooney kidnaps her and ties her up. That sort of thing
would connect with Ivins' known fantasies. The movie came out in
1998, but he could have rented it or watched it on TV.

More research found another movie Lopez made that's closer to the right
time frame, and the movie contains the right kind of story. It's
the movie "The Cell,"
which came out in 2000.
I don't remember much about "The Cell" (except that I didn't like it),
but the Internet Movie Database says this about the plot (Jennifer
Lopez plays "Catherine Deane"):

Catharine Deane is a
psychotherapist who is part of a revolutionary new treatment which
allows her mind to literally enter the mind of her patients.

Yes, indeed, it's very easy
to see Ivins being fascinated with Jennifer Lopez after she played a
psychotherapist who could literally enter the mind of a patient.
Ivins had been searching for such a woman for decades.

That additional information probably raises the certainty level that
Ivins sent
the J-Lo letter to about 30%.

I find this all a lot more
interesting than trying to figure out what some
True Believer sees in Ivins' notebooks or in some totally unrelated
cases that
he's incapable of
explaining - or unwilling to explain because he knows his explanations
would seem
totally ridiculous.

But, I don't know if it's worth my time to try to decode every one of
Bruce Ivins' mysteries, either. If I keep trying, I'll never get
anything else done. Yet, it can
be fascinating.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, June 26, 2011, thru Saturday, July 2, 2011

June 26, 2011
- For awhile now, I've been wondering: What was Bruce Ivins planning to
blow up
when he purchased "bomb
making ingredients" early in 2000? According to page
50 of David Willman's book "The Mirage Man," Ivins had purchased ammonium nitrate to make a bomb
sometime prior to his first session with Dr. David Irwin.
It appears that Ivins called Dr. Naomi Heller when he began worrying
about what he might do with the bomb. But, Dr. Heller had
retired, and she referred him to Dr. Irwin. Page 238 of the EBAP
report says that Dr. Irwin ("Dr. #2") treated Ivins from February 1,
2000 to July 24, 2000. So, Bruce Ivins told Dr. Irwin that he'd
bought the ammonium nitrate to make a bomb, and Ivins had probably made
the purchase in January. But, there's no hint of what Ivins
planned to blow up.

All the problems with vaccine development were already in place in
January of 2000, and in some ways they were more intense than a year
later. Mara Linscott had left USAMRIID, and Ivins was anxious to
find some way to lure her back. Creating a panic over a
possible biological attack involving anthrax could solve all of Ivins'
problems.

However, while
Bruce Ivins was dangerous, devious
and
sociopathic, he wasn't a
cold-blooded murderer. There is no reason to believe he was
planning to kill a lot of innocent
Americans. So, either he was planning to blow up
something when there were no people around, or, more likely, he was
planning create a very dangerous bomb that he would plant somewhere and
leave the timer or detonator unconnected, or he would somehow make
certain the bomb was found
before it actually detonated. Clearly, that kind of bomb plot
wouldn't serve any useful purpose unless
there was something else
involved -- such as a letter filled with
anthrax left behind near the bomb. It would be the anthrax-filled
letter that would
provide the message Ivins wanted to send, not the supposed target of
the bomb, nor
any destruction from any
bomb. The unexploded bomb would have been just "the attention
getter." It seems very likely that in January of
2000, Ivins had already constructed the TEXT of the letter that he
would
eventually
send to media organizations over a year later. As I wrote in my comment on March 13 of this year:

The time
needed to put together the coded message very strongly suggests that the
hidden
message and letter were developed long
before 9/11.

So, in January of 2000, Bruce Ivins probably spent weeks putting together the right
coded message in the right way. The end result may have been a
computer printed version looking something like this:

THIS IS NEXT

TAKE PENACILIN
NOW

DEATH TO
AMERICA

DEATH TO ISRAEL

ALLAH IS GREAT

However, that would pose a
serious problem of making the hidden coded message in the letter seem
far too
obvious. Everyone seeing such a printed message would immediately
begin
wondering why
certain printed characters were larger and darker. Obviously, it
must be a code of some kind. If the entire country was trying to
figure out what the highlighted A's and T's meant, someone was bound to
put the pieces together and figure out that it was a code derived from
the book Gödel, Escher, Bach,
that each sentence consisted of 3 words, and that the coding almost
certainly referred to three letter codons: TTT AAT TAT. And that
in turn translated to PAT or FNY. And, he'd given a copy of Gödel,
Escher, Bach to Patricia
Fellows, so she might be among the first to put all the pieces
together. If not her, then it would be Nancy Haigwood who had
discussed the book with Ivins in great detail after its initial
publication in 1979.

The computer printed message was obviously too easy to decode,
particularly by
the wrong people. He may also have tried writing a version using
his left hand. But, that wouldn't have been much better if he
deliberately traced over those nine A's and T's, plus it posed the additional risk that handwriting
experts might be able to match his handwriting to the letters if he was
somehow compelled to produce handwriting samples using his left
hand. And then there'd be the problem of making certain he used
paper and a pen that could never be traced back to him.

And there was a
more
serious problem: Planting an ammonium
nitrate bomb in some public place was not as simple as breaking into a
Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house that he knew was empty and unguarded.
If he were caught in the process of planting the bomb, the consequences
would be a lot more severe
than being caught inside a sorority house without a good
explanation.
No amount of explaining would ever convince people that he didn't
actually intend to harm anyone with the bomb.

So, the plan was never
carried
out. And for a few months, Dr. Irwin tried to get Ivins to forget
about making any kind of bomb for any purpose.
Then Ivins
was referred to Dr. Levy, whose Comprehensive Counseling Associates was
closer to where Ivins lived, and cheaper, too. And the bomb and
the letter remained just a bad, suppressed idea -- until Ivins devised
a solution
to
the handwriting problem sometime within the next year.

By late August of 2001, Ivins
had realized that the perfect way to write the letters
without
any risk that a handwriting expert would match his handwriting to the
letter was to have someone else do
the actual writing. It was a simple matter for Ivins to
convince a six-year-old child in his wife's day care center to write
the letter for him. The child was just beginning his first
weeks of first grade and was only around while waiting for his parents
to pick him up at the Ivins home after the school bus dropped him
off. There would be no problem convincing the child to provide a
sample of his handwriting
skills for nice Mr. Ivins. Very likely, the child was proud of
his writing skills since he seemed to write much better than the
average child just starting first grade. And, best of all, most
people would
view the
childlike handwriting to be that of a Muslim terrorist who was
accustomed to writing in a totally different alphabet.

Of course, there was a risk that the child might tell his
parents
about writing the letter, but Ivins' skills with handling children
could
easily get around that problem. For example, he could attract the
six-year-old
child's attention by doing some funny juggling with coffee cups and/or
glasses, pretending again and again to almost drop a cup or a glass but
recovering just
in the nick of time. It's a standard juggler attention-getting
trick. It always gets gasps and a laugh.

Then he'd engage the child in a discussion:

Ivins:
Do you know
how to juggle?Child: No.Ivins: Would you like
to learn?Child: Sure!Ivins: Well, I can't
teach you how to juggle using cups and glasses, so I'll have to find
something that doesn't break. I can go look for something
that we can practice with, but I wonder if you'd do
something for me while I'm gone ...Child: Sure! Okay!Ivins: Do you have a pen
and paper from school?Child: Sure. I
have lots of pens and paper in my backpack.Ivins: I need you to copy a
letter I've written. Here it is. Can you copy this?Child: Sure! It's
easy!Ivins: But, you see these
A's and T's that are darker than all the other letters?Child: Yeah.Ivins: You have to
make sure all those letters are darker than the other stuff in the
letter when you make a copy. Do you think you can do that?Child: Sure! That's
easy.Ivins: Great. You
make the copy. I'll be back in a few minutes, and then I'll teach
you how to juggle.

And, when Ivins returned with three children's blocks or something
similarly unbreakable, he would thank the
child for writing the letter, he'd put immediately it aside, and he
would begin showing the child how to juggle the blocks.

The child would be focused on the fun of learning to juggle. Even
if
he never actually mastered the art, it would be fun learning, and the
chore of writing of the
letter would be totally forgotten. It would be no more
important
than money spent to see a movie. You tell people about the
movie you saw, not about the admission money spent to get in.

Later, when Ivins examined the letter, he would see that the child did
far less than a perfect job.

Some of the A's and T's were not as
thoroughly darkened as others, and some additional characters seemed
slightly traced over. However, the letter would be perfect because the coding in the
letter was not perfect.
When necessary, he'd be able to explain things convincingly, but the
risk of having someone else figure out the code prematurely was vastly
reduced. There wouldn't be much thought of hidden codes, because
the thought would be that anyone deliberately putting a code into a
letter would make certain that everything was clearly done.

So, Bruce Ivins had the letter he needed. But the risks of
planting the bomb still remained.

That all changed a couple weeks later when the horrendous
events of 9/11 made the building and planting
of the bomb totally unnecessary.

The revised plan required that the child do some more writing, but that
wouldn't be a problem. It was simply a matter of providing
another enjoyable juggling lesson in exchange for some easily forgotten
help
addressing some envelopes. Of course, Ivins needed to add the
date at the top of the letter. So, he used the child's
handwriting of address numbers on the envelopes to make certain that
when he added the date, the handwriting seemed the same.

There was a lot more risk to the public in sending multiple envelopes
filled with
anthrax powder through the mails than just leaving a single envelope
with anthrax near an unexploded bomb, but there didn't seem
to be any better
alternative. And Ivins would tape the seams shut on the envelopes
to make certain no powder escaped.

It's all very simple. It's all very clear. The only thing I
cannot understand about this scenario is why so few people find it
impossible to believe - or impossible to even consider. All the facts fit.
In
nearly ten years, no one has ever
found a single solid fact that
disproves anything in this scenario. All that's happened
during
the past ten years is that more and more
facts were found to support
the scenario. The information about bomb making ingredients
is the latest addition.

This pronouncement
of guilt is not consistent with the ethics and traditional practice of
forensic psychiatry.
....

Specifically, the
report found that Ivins had the “psychological disposition,” motive,
means and the “behavioral history” to carry out the attacks. The
use of a psychological profile to infer guilt is particularly
problematic, since this evidence is not admissible in most
jurisdictions.

And she doesn't like the fact that the report is for sale:

From
an ethical standpoint, the sale of the panel report is particularly
problematic. Forensic reports are generated at the request
of the retaining agency or individual, and the information in the
report is usually not distributed beyond the parties immediately
involved in the proceedings. The forensic evaluator himself does
not typically distribute a report to non-involved individuals, nor does
the evaluator sell the report to the public.

And she infers that the EBAP may
have been biased:

According to the website of
the Research Strategies Network, which organized the panel, the RSN has
previously collaborated with the F.B.I. and the Department of Defense. This creates an appearance of conflict of interest
and bias, a common problem among mental health professionals who
consult with law enforcement agencies.

The purpose of the EBAP report, of course, was to determine what
lessons could be learned from the Bruce Ivins case in order to help
prevent other mentally ill scientists from working with dangerous
pathogens and perhaps committing similar acts, and to provide that
information
to all interested parties.

But, if I understand Dr. Hanson's complaints correctly, she feels the
EBAP report
should have been written to show that Ivins might have been innocent, the
report shouldn't have been distributed to anyone outside of the
courtroom where it was authorized, and it shouldn't have been written
by anyone who ever collaborated with the FBI, since that infers bias.

In other words, the report either should have (1) been written in such
a way as to make it totally useless, or (2) it should never have
been written at all. And the Lunatic Fringe
agrees. Click HERE
and HERE.

June 23, 2011 -
When I created the image I used yesterday to show how the X, IL, I and
R in the media letter show evidence of a lack of writing
experience, I began with a large .jpg image of the media
letter. Jpg images are compressed to reduce file size, so,
when enlarged, they show blurry elements that are artifacts (or the
effects) of compression. This morning, I dug out the original
.TIF photographs of the letters - which are not compressed - and recreated the
X-IL-I-R image. In doing so, I used a different second I, which
better illustrates the slight retracing as the writer moved to begin
the next pen stroke but didn't fully lift the pen off the paper.

June 22, 2011 (B)
- The Anthrax Truthers are having a hard time disputing the logic in my
(A) comment for today, so now they
are saying the logic somehow "destroys" the hidden message
"theory," without explaining how
it destroys it. Presumably, they feel that if Douglas Hofstadter
(or just about anyone)
doesn't accept the FBI's analysis, then the FBI must be wrong. It seems
inconceivable to them that the FBI could have more data than Hofstadter
does. (Hofstadter knows about the coding technique, but the FBI
knows about the culprit and how his mental processes worked.)

In addition, the Anthrax Truthers are questioning some other tiny
details about the handwriting in the media letter and whether or not
those details show that other
characters were traced over. Greatly enlarged examples:

Do those stray marks indicate the letters were traced over, or are they
examples of poor hand-eye coordination? The X clearly isn't
traced over. So, what's the explanation for that tiny horizontal
line? The fact that it is a horizontal
line says it cannot be part
of a trace-over. It's more likely a "hiccup," i.e., something
happened while drawing the X that caused the writer to
twitch. The bump at the end of the horizontal line in the L
seems to be something inadvertently drawn when the writer slowly lifted
the pen from the paper. The bump on the side of the first I
seems to
be a pause mark where the writer paused to check something before
completing the I. The bump at the bottom of the second I and the
R leg are almost
certainly the result of the writer not fully lifting the pen from the
paper as he completed one stroke and moved to draw the next
stroke. They're all further evidence that a child wrote the anthrax letters.
They are not
trace-overs as
seen in the characters that are part of the
hidden message. They are examples of a lack of experience
when writing.

June 22, 2011 (A)
- The Anthrax Truthers are still debating
an FBI file which contains a
5-page interview from February 2008 with someone who was asked about
the handwriting on
the New York Post and Leahy letters. Previously, it
was argued by Anthrax Truthers on Lew Weinstein's blog and
elsewhere that the person being interviewed was a handwriting expert. There
is plenty of evidence in the interview document to show that is false (the interviewee sees as
unusal some very common ways of drawing R's and E's.) On July 4,
2010, I posted a comment about someone who tried to say the same thing
on Wikipedia. Now, a
new voice has offered an opinion about parts of an image of two
paragraphs
from that interview that are available for viewing by clicking HERE.
Here's the opinion:

Based on the way the 2nd
blank
(redacted element) was very much shorter than the other blanks, AND
based upon the fact that rival ideas were expressed and exchanged, I would ‘guesstimate’ that 2 to 6
analysts were expressing their opinions in the above 2
paragraphs.

In reality, it's a total certainty that only one
person was interviewed, that person was a male, and his last name contains 10
characters. And, that is not a
"guessitimate." It's the result of analyzing the actual FBI document, which is on pages 18
to 23 of FBI pdf
File #847547.
Since that particular FBI interview keeps coming up in arguments from
Anthrax Truthers, I decided it was time to do a thorough and
careful analysis of the FBI interview. And what I found
surprised even me. I'd
previously argued that the interviewee was almost certainly a
USAMRIID
employee, possibly the person to whom Ivins was known to have given a
copy of Gödel Escher Bach.
Now, I can see that was not
true, since, by careful
analysis, it can be determined with about 98% certainty who was
being interviewed.

Here is my analysis:

First,
the opening paragraph of the document makes it clear that only one
person was interviewed. (Even
DXer
can see that.) Although
the information is all redacted, that first paragraph contains the
person's name,
date of birth, Social Security number and cellular phone number, and
says the person was interviewed at his home. Second,
it can be seen that the Courier font was used when typing the
document. The Courier font uses characters of equal size, so a
small "i" takes as much space as a capital "W". Thus, the number
of characters in a name can be reliably counted. And, for
example, when
counting the number of characters in the paragraph indentation, the
indentation can
be seen to be 10 characters.

So, the first paragraph of the interview in fixed-width format (like
the Courier font) looks like this, with X's replacing the redacted
portions:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX date of birth:
XXXXXXXXXXX social security account number
XXXXXXXXXXX, telephone number XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX cellular
telephone number: XXXXXXXXXXXXX was interviewedat XXX residence located at
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX After being advised
of the identity of the interviewingagents and the purpose of
the interview XXXXXXXXXX
provided thefollowing information:

Thus, it is a certainty that only one person was interviewed.

Third,
the second paragraph shows that the people doing the interview are two
FBI agents and an Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA). Here's
that
paragraph:

In addition to the interviewing agents, AssistantUnited States Attorney (AUSA),
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX waspresent for the interview. Prior
to the start of the interviewXXXXXXXXXX
was presented a non-disclosure agreement and informedof the sensitivity of the information
and investigation to bediscussed. XXXXXXXXXX signed the
non-disclosure which will beplaced in the 1A section of the file
along with the interviewnotes.

Fourth, in
the above two paragraphs and in all
others in the document, it is clear that the redacted areas
contain exactly ten characters
where only the interviewee's last name is used (as I highlighted in
red).

Fifth,
where pronouns are used instead of the full last name, it is clear that
the pronoun is two characters - he
- and not she. Thus the interviewee is male. There's an example in
the paragraph in the
image on Lew Weinstein's site (which is from page 4 of the FBI
interview document):

XXXXXXXXXX
suggested that the average person might not think
the 'T' in "NEXT" was highlighted. XX indicated that ifthe
mailer intended to have a message in the text of the lettersit
would be clear which letters were part of the message.

The last paragraph on the first page
of the document says:

XXXXXXXXXX
briefly discussed the three parts of amessage:
the frame message, the outer message, and the innermessage.
The frame message is the information that a messageexists
in some form; the outer message is the recognition of the'language'
in which the message is encoded; and the innermessage
is the decoding and understanding of the message.

Sixth,
the paragraph above again shows that the interviewee has a
10-character last name, and the paragraph has the interviewee explaining to the FBI agents and the AUSA the
coding process described in the book Gödel,
Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB).

Seventh,
the author of GEB is Douglas
Hofstadter, who has a last name
that is 10 characters long.

I was contacted by the FBI a couple of
years ago about this
case, and a couple of FBI people in fact came to my house and spent a
few hours talking with me and then went through a bunch of
correspondence (both electronic and postal) that I'd had for many years
with hundreds if not thousands of people here, there, and everywhere,
looking for possible connections with the person they suspected had
done the mailings, but as far as I understood, they didn't come up with
anything at all. I think they wondered if GEB had had some kind of
influence on him, since he was apparently a fan of the book, but I
don't see how it could have influenced him, and I don't think that they
ever really found any link either. So I think it's basically a red
herring, although for me it was interesting to meet the FBI people and
to get a tiny glimpse into their way of investigating a complex and
important case.

So, we know that Mr. Hofstadter was interviewed by the FBI a couple years before the USA
article (2008 vs 2010), and we know
that Mr. Hofstadter would be the one person on the planet prepared to
explain the
coding process described in GEB to FBI agents. Ninth,
the
person being
interviewed shows significant ignorance about handwriting when he
states that the R's and E's were written in a way that appears
"unusual" to him and
may indicate that the writer is more accustomed to writing from left to
right. In reality, what he sees as "unusual" may be far more
common than his way of
drawing R's and E's.

Tenth, there
is nothing in the FBI interview document which would be inconsistent
with the interviewee being Douglas Hofstadter.

Therefore:

Conclusion:
The person interviewed by the FBI on February 8, 2008 was almost
certainly Douglas R. Hofstadter.

Mr. Hofstadter is nota
handwriting expert. Mr. Hofstadter's opinions about the
handwriting
are his own and are of no more value to the case than that of any other
non-expert. The facts indicate that he had developed his
own theory
about the source of the letters, and that theory altered his view of
what was actually in the letters. He was rationalizing to make
the
facts of the case
fit his own personal theory. June
20, 2011 (B)
- I've been meaning to mention something about the mental health care
professionals who treated Bruce Ivins: In 1978 or 1979, Ivins told a woman, Dr.
Naomi Heller, about a plan he had to poison Nancy Haigwood.
In July of 2000, Ivins told awoman,
his
counselor Judith McLean, about a plan he had to poison Mara
Linscott. In 2008, Ivins told two women,
counselors Jean Duley and Wendy Levy (Dr. Allen Levy's wife) about his
plan to shoot his co-workers and go out in "a blaze of glory." I
can't help but wonder if Ivins wasn't compelled to confide in these
women just like he confided in Mara Linscott and Patricia Fellows,
while avoiding discussing those kinds of intimate desires with his male
psychiatrists, Dr. Allen Levy and Dr. David Irwin. Thus, Ivins
could have given the men a somewhat different picture of
himself. Dr. Levy
prescribed anti-psychotic drugs for Ivins, and Dr. Irwin diagnosed Ivins as "sociopathic,"
so Ivins wasn't telling them a totally
different story. But there may
have been significant differences in what Ivins told the women versus
what he told the men.

June 20, 2011 (A) -
Since I pointed out in my Sunday comment that, in July of 2000, Ivins'
former mental health counselor Judith McLean talked with three of Bruce Ivins' psychiatrists
after Ivins told her of his plans to poison Mara Linscott, and those
psychiatrists confirmed
what Ivins had said to McLean, the argument has now shifted to the fact
that the psychiatists didn't all agree with McLean on how dangerous
Ivins was.

The fact that Ivins
stated
plans to poison Mara Linscott is no longer the issue in the on-line
debates.
The issue is now that the record shows that not everyone believed that
Ivins might actually go through
with such plans. And the current claim is, evidently, that anyone
who
believed that Ivins might actually go through with those plans is
incompetent and their testimony should be removed from the Expert
Behavioral Analysis Panel (EBAP) report,
from David Willman's book, and from the public record.
It evidently doesn't matter to the Anthrax Truthers that a year later
Ivins allegedly murdered five
people by sending out the anthrax
letters, proving that Ivins was indeed extremely dangerous.The email addresses
of all the
EBAP members are being distributed (the addresses are not in the
30-page summary of the 299 page report), and so are email addresses
used by Judith McLean. The motivation seems to be to get people
to
try to convince the EBAP members that they should recall their report,
and to contact
Judith
McLean if people do not like her book or what she said about Bruce
Ivins.June
19, 2011 (B)
- During the past week, I've been scratching my head over all the
senseless attacks upon Bruce Ivins' therapist Judith McLean
that have been raging on Lew Weinstein's blog HERE,
HERE,
HERE
and HERE,
on Dr. Meryl Nass's site HERE,
and in a flood of screwball emails I've been getting directly and via
my forum.

The mindless attacks truly show how Anthrax Truthers will do anything they can to discredit
evidence which does not agree with their beliefs. However,
attempting to discredit Judith McLean by
attacking a totally unrelated book she wrote many years after the
attacks
doesn't change what Ivins told her in July of 2000. What Ivins
told her
about his plan that July to poison Mara Linscott was confirmed by three practicing
psychiatrists. Some of the details are on page 73 of the
Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel report, but there are more details and
the psychiatrists are identified on pages 65 and 66 of David Willman's
book "The Mirage Man."

When Bruce Ivins told McLean of his plans to poison Mara Linscott,
McLean immediately advised Dr. Orrin Palmer, who was in charge at Comprehensive
Counseling Associates while Ivins' primary psychiatrist Dr. Allen Levy
was out of town. Dr. Palmer called Ivins to confirm what Ivins had told McLean.

Meanwhile, McLean
persuaded Ivins to sign a pledge
that he wouldn't harm anyone and that he'd contact McLean immediately
if he had further "homicidal thoughts."

McLean then talked with
Ivins' previous psychiatrist, Dr. David Irwin, who
talked with Bruce Ivins at length on the following day.
Dr. Irwin felt that Ivins was no longer exhibiting the homicidal
thoughts, although he still had clear "sociopathic intentions."
Dr. Irwin was
uncertain if prescribing some new medicines would help.

Then, when Dr. Allen Levy returned to town,
Dr.
Levy talked with Ivins to further
confirm what had been said, and Dr. Levy prescribed Zyprexa, an
antipsychotic drug for treating schizophrenia and other mental problems.

So, all the mindless
attacks
upon Judith McLean are totally bogus. What McLean heard from Dr. Ivins
was confirmed multiple times by psychiatrists and had nothing to do with the book she
wrote. And the
Lunatic Fringe prediction that Willman's book will be recalled
because Judith McLean's testimony was used in it is just plain ridiculous and silly.

June
19, 2011 (A) -
Lately, the arguments from one particular Anthrax Truther have not only
become repetitious, some
postings and emails are becoming virtually incoherent and irrational.
For example, I received this message via email (addressed to a
conspiracy theorist, with me being carbon copied):

Ed obviously has not read
any of
these pattern books - if he is not going to consult with experts, he
should at least read the peer-reviewed literature

In a dark dark roomAnimals should definitely NOT go to schoolFive Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed by Eileen ChristelowFrom Head to Toe by Eric Carle

and then this:

Mr. Lake's error is that he
fails
to realize the perp could have used a pattern book such as "If You Give
A Mouse A Cookie" (or alternatively just have been writing in block
letters)

and then this:

page 12 of Five Little
Monkeys
Jumping on the Bed by Eileen Christelow, without more, blows his theory
out of the bathtub

and then this:

the trouble with Ed's
theory was
always his sloppy treatment of documentary evidence - he never took a
scientific approach to the question - Judith [McLean?] could explain he
needs to study scientific method

Then I received these messages addressed to me, with the conspiracy
theorist carbon-copied:

I hope you don't feel
intimidated, Ed - no one takes your First Grader theory seriously - not
a single person - I certainly never called anyone about it, you moron

and

you're not still sore
because we blew your First Grader Theory out of the water, are
you? I can't help that you didn't choose representative samples
of First Grade writing in spewing your nonsense

The emailer appears to be
suggesting that the person who wrote the anthrax letters could have
been copying a child's handwriting from some children's book.
However, one thing most of the experts seem to agree upon is that the
handwriting was not done by
copying someone else's handwriting style
(although the writer was
copying the
text and addresses from some source). Copying someone
else's handwriting style can
usually be detected by the inconsistencies that will show up in the
style.

Plus, of course, the key points about the
handwriting are the changes that
took place over the course of about a month, between the first writing
sample (the Brokaw letter) and the last writing sample (the senate
envelopes):

1.
The writer started using punctuation.2. The writer
started
writing smaller (about half
the original size).3. The writer
learned the
proper way to draw certain characters of the alphabet.4. The writer
developed
better hand-eye coordination.

And, the writing was done in
August, September and October when a six-year-old would be spending his
first months in first grade - the time when the biggest changes from
his kindergarten style of writing would be taking place.

How can these changes be explained by copying from some children's book
or some book about children's handwriting? If the "perp" did
that, wouldn't the writing be the same all the way through?
Are we supposed to believe that some expert forger knew that a child's
handwriting goes through significant changes in the first months of
first grade, and the forger deliberately tried to mimic those
handwriting changes? Does that meet anyone'sOccam's razor
test? Can that be anything but a desperate rationalization to
force the handwriting facts to fit some fixed belief.

Besides, the facts seem to show that the anthrax mailer thought that
his first letters would accomplish what he intended to
accomplish. He only sent out the second
batch of letters because, after three weeks, there was absolutely
nothing in the news about his first batch. So, we're supposed to
believe that the "expert forger" realized that there would be changes
in a six-year-old's handwriting during those three weeks, and he tried
to mimic them?! Gimme a break!

The question results from this paragraph on page 200 of David Willman's
book:

As
of January 2003, Lambert and his
investigators knew that the dogs
had alerted on at least one other scientist, Patricia Fellows,
who formerly worked at USAMRIID but was implicated by no credible
evidence. A document that Lambert prepared for Director Mueller's
personal briefing of Senators Daschle and Leahy in January 2003 said
that the bloodhounds had reacted
to Hatfill and Fellows only, adding, "however she assisted with
the initial processing of the Daschle/Leahy evidence."

The answer: It doesn't fit
with my hypothesis. It doesn't fit with any viable hypothesis.
Therefore, until proven otherwise, it is just another piece of evidence
showing that the bloodhound evidence is not very reliable.

We don't know the circumstances under which the bloodhounds sniffed Pat
Fellows. So, there might be an explanation somewhere, but there
isn't enough available information to find it. And it doesn't
seem worthwhile to hunt for. (The Anthrax Truthers will, of
course, disagree. For them, anything
that might somehow show the
FBI had made a mistake would be seen as very worthwhile hunting for --
until the end of time, if need be.)

June 17, 2011 -
The Anthrax Truthers seem to have run out of arguments, since they are
starting to repeat themselves. Now they
are arguing once again that the T in NEXT in the media letters is
not traced over. Here it is:

Clearly, the horizontal line on the T is traced
over. It's certainly the darkest lettering stroke in the
word. Plus, you can actually see the two strokes used in the
horizontal line.

What the arguments from the Anthrax Truthers fail to consider is the
difficulty of getting a six-year-old child to write things exactly the way you want them
written. But, of course, the Anthrax Truthers cannot imagine that
Ivins would ever have used a child that way, even though the facts say that a child wrote the anthrax
letters.

June
15, 2011 (B)
- Hmm. As I was downloading and saving this morning's access logs
for my web site, I noticed a lot of visits from a site at http://www.hanknuwer.com/blog/.
It turned out to be a blog operated by Hank Nuwer, the author of
"Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of
Hazing," the book which reprinted the fraudulent letter advocating hazing that Bruce Ivins
wrote to the Frederick News-Post using Nancy Haigwood's
name.

Nuwer's blog entry for today contains a long commentary about David
Willman's
new book. It begins with this:

The new book by David
Willman called “The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and
America’s Rush to War” (Bantam, $27) has verifiable information
provided to me by an FBI researcher/investigator some years ago that
the Frederick (VA) newspaper article purportedly written by Kappa Kappa
Gamma alumnus Nancy Haigwood in defense of hazing was written actually
by Ivins. That was an
ethical breach by Ivins if true he signed her name to the letter, and
it now appears to be so, according to Willman and others. I sure wish I had smelled a rat named
Ivins (April 22, 1946 – July 29, 2008) back then and nailed him for the
forgery instead of reprinting a couple sentences in my own book “Broken
Pledges.”

Later in the blog entry, Nuwer writes:

Some 21 years after
publication, my apologies go to Ms. Haigwood for the “Broken Pledges”
reprinting of the editor to the letter that Ivins wrote. Clearly, she
wasn’t an advocate of hazing. And wasn’t that nice of Ivins to forward
his forged letter to a mother who had lost her son to hazing?

It's an interesting comment from one of Ivins' victims. Mr. Nuwer
wasn't a victim of the anthrax attacks, of course. He was just
another victim of Ivins' decades of lies and deceit.

June
15, 2011 (A)
- This morning, The Boston Globe has another "opinion" article by David
Willman publicizing his book. The article is titled "Revisiting
Mueller and the anthrax case." The opinion piece is critical
of FBI Director Mueller and his alleged role in keeping the
investigation focused on Steven Hatfill for so long.
Willman also revisits the role the bloodhounds played in the
"investigation" of Hatfill:

The FBI’s commitment to the
dog evidence served to misdirect the investigation for years — and it
could have been averted, based on well-publicized murder and rape cases
in which the dogs’ reliability had been discredited.

Some of the questions I have about the bloodhounds are: If the dogs
were following a scent extracted from the anthrax letters, why did
their sniffing begin at a Denny's
restaurant
in Louisiana? And why did the bloodhounds sniff around the
driveway of Bill Patrick's home? And why did the bloodhounds
sniff around Hatfill's storage locker in Florida? Why was all
that sniffing done before the
bloodhounds were allowed to sniff Hatfill himself? I think
I know the answers. I just wonder
why no one else ever seems to ask those questions.

June 13, 2011 (B)
- The Lunatic Fringe seems to be working themselves into a frenzy over
the personal beliefs of Judith McLean and the fact that David Willman
interviewed her for his book.

Yesterday, "BugMaster"
posted a message to Dr. Meryl Nass's site which says this about
Willman's book:

Now he [Willman] is
spreading what she [Judith McLean] said in a two month book tour. I
predict that Bantam will be sued for millions of dollars if Mr. Willman
does not add much needed balance on such a central issue of witness
credibility. The fact Dr. Ivins was driven to commit suicide does not
end the question in some states where he is promoting the book. It's a
case lots of lawyers would take pro bono. Bantam's lawyers should brief
him on the law before it is too late.

I was tempted to send a response to their posts to Dr. Nass's site, but
the lunacy speaks
for itself. Besides, as the saying goes, "Any publicity is good
publicity." So, their rantings can only help the sales of Willman's book.

June
12, 2011
- Uh oh. I had expected to see a bunch of new book reviews of
David Willman's "The Mirage Man" today. And I hoped to be able to
use them as source material for this morning's comment. It didn't
happen. I found a long
article on MSNBC.com, but it's basically just passages from the
book. No opinions.

So, I'll have to write something from scratch. Groan.

Early this morning, on Lew Weinstein's blog, "Anonymous"
pointed out that Weinstein is mentioned in the book. That
probably means "Anonymous" has read the book. "Anonymous" is
mentioned by name in the book, too. So are many other people who
have beliefs and theories that disagree with the FBI's
conclusions. They are listed in the index:

In the Appendix, which is subtitled "The Case Against Bruce Ivins,"
Willman addresses most of the questions these people use to justify
disbelieving the evidence. On page 339: "Did Ivins have
both the expertise and opportunity to prepare the anthrax?" On
page 343: "Did the presence of silicon in the attack spores show that
the material was weaponized, that is, treated with a chemical
additive?" On page 345: "If the silicon-containing material
was not added - how did it get inside the spores?" There are
other questions and answers before the Appendix turns to the
circumstantial evidence against Ivins, going through the evidence item
by item.

I'm also mentioned in the book, but only in the Notes section. On
page 316, Willman writes about Ivins leaving the mental hospital in
July of
2008 and immediately going to drug stores to buy Tylenol tablets.
Then,

That
evening, he visited the county library
branch on East Patrick Street, just two miles away in downtown
Frederick. Ivins made his way to the second floor, where scores
of computers were available to the public. Library policy limited
to one hour a person's use of any single computer. [note]
33 From 7 P.M. to 8:30 P.M., FBI agents who were tailing
him watched as Ivins logged on and off one, and then another, computer
to check various e-mail accounts -- and to review a Web site dedicated entirely
to developments in the anthrax investigation. [note] 34

Note #34 on page 417 gives the sources for the above information.
It says:

34.
Sworn affidavit from FBI agent
Marlo Arredondo filed with a federal judge in support of obtaining a
search warrant to search e-mail accounts established by Bruce Ivins,
August 7, 2008; author's interviews in 2010 with Amerithrax
investigators, who said the Web
site Ivins checked from a computer in the Frederick library was
anthraxinvestigation.com, maintained by Edward G. Lake.

I mentioned this visit by Ivins to my web site in my (A) comment on August 8, 2008. after the
Associated Press wrote about the visit Ivins made to a web site
while
at that library. My logs showed that Ivins did a Google search
for "Ed
Lake," which brought him to my site. On my site on that day, July 24, 2008, I had a comment
about CNN's Kelly Arena's interview with FBI Director Mueller in which
Mueller said:

I’m confident that it
[the anthrax case]
will be resolved.

I tell you, we’ve made great
progress in the investigation.
It’s in no way dormant.

I don't know how
interesting that will be to readers of this blog, but here's something
that may be of even less interest: I recently talked with a
researcher/journalist who asked me how I became interested in the
anthrax case. I told her what I've always told people: it was a
result of a discussion I saw on Bill Maher's TV show "Politically
Incorrect" back in October of 2001, just after I returned home from the
Austin Film Festival. On previous occasions, I'd tried looking
for the first message I
ever posted on the subject, but could never find it. Last
week, I decided to give it another try. And, I finally found the
first
message I ever posted about anthrax. Here it is:

From:
Ed LakeTime: Oct 15 2001,
12:17 pmNewsgroup: alt.tv.pol-incorrectTopic: Atom Bombing bin LadenI just got home from a trip,
and I'm catching up on PI shows I taped
while gone.

On one of them, Bill was
ranting like he seemed to want to
atom bomb
someone - anyone - particularly if there were more anthrax cases.

It seemed to me to be the
stupidest thing he's ever said on
his show.

He wants to drop an atom bomb
on some caves in mountain
country? What
does he expect to achieve? First of all, the blast would be
contained
by the mountains and would do little damage. Second, the fallout
would
drift across Pakistan and India.

Can anyone really be so
stupid as to want to drop atom bombs
because
they feel a need for revenge? I guess Bill can.

Ed

It seemed like a reasonable comment to make back then, and it still
seems reasonable today.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, June 5, 2011, thru Saturday, June 11, 2011June 11, 2011 (B)
- Some Anthrax Truthers have questioned whether "Lunatic Fringe" is too
strong a term to use for some people who believe Ivins was
innocent. It might be too strong to apply to some Anthrax Truthers, but there is a Lunatic Fringe group among the
Truthers where true lunacy really seems to be rampant.

Isn't it lunacy to argue that there is no proof that Ivins was innocent
because the FBI is hiding all
the proof? How do these people know such evidence exists?
They know it because they believe it. No further proof
is necessary.

Isn't it lunacy to claim to show "proof" that something the FBI has
stated was false, yet the
"proof" actually shows what the FBI stated was true? And the person making
the claim cannot explain how something that is true is actually false.

A few days ago, I hinted that I may know the name of the mother of the
child who wrote the anthrax letters. Who but a lunatic would make
a wild, idiotic guess about who that mother might be, then call the
woman to claim that I accused her child of participating in five
murders?

True to form, the Lunatic Fringe has now launched a campaign to
discredit the testimony by Judith McLean, who was Bruce Ivins'
counselor in June and July of 2000, when Ivins talked about his plans
to poison Mara Linscott. There are threads on Lew Weinstein's
site HERE
and HERE.
And a posting on the same subject has been made to an email forum I
run. The same kind of attack was previously made upon Jean
Duley's credibility. Is it considered "normal" to hunt for things
to use to personally attack anyone who disagrees with you? If
it's not lunacy, what is it?

As Einstein warned, we can’t solve problems with the same
thinking we used when we created them. Our system for securing
biodefense facilities has already failed. Rather than fix it, we have
multiplied opportunities for breaches.

Another:

One need not be convinced
of Ivins’s guilt to realize he should not have been allowed anywhere
near the Army’s anthrax, let alone given unrestricted, 24/7 access to
live spores for nearly 28 years.

And another:

Colleagues of Ivins who
believe he was the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks told me they have
stayed silent for fear of professional repercussions, including loss of
their jobs.

Willman draws a very grim picture of what has been done (or not done)
in the past ten years to prevent another Bruce Ivins from getting his
hands on lethal pathogens.

June 10, 2011 (B)
- Ah! The first edition of "The Mirage Man" I ordered from
Amazon.com just arrived by U.S. Mail.

June
10, 2011 (A)
-
I found another review of David Willman's book "The Mirage Man."
This one is from RealClearPolitics,
which describes itself as "an independent, non-partisan media company
that is the trusted source for the best news, analysis and commentary.
Founded in 2000." So, it's not just some guy's personal blog.

The review is titled "Anthrax
Attacks and America's Rush to Judgment." Unlike the reviewer
for the LA Times, this reviewer, Carl M. Cannon, found no problem with
the "structure" of the book. He describes it as "meticulous and
authoritative." And, he
says:

"The Mirage Man"
should be
required reading in every journalism school, and law school, in this
country. It should be the textbook of a case study at the FBI Academy
in Quantico, Va. -- and police academies everywhere. It should be
taught in college government classes, and handed out to freshman
members of Congress when they arrive in Washington, and to staffers
assigned to the Capitol Hill committees and the White House National
Security Council.

I can't disagree with that. And I certainly agree with the four
paragraphs about Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and New York Times' columnist
Nicholas Kristof on the 3rd page of the lengthy review, including this:

Kristof, who asserted
openly in his column that he was trying to "prod" the FBI into
following up on his hunch, was considered a ridiculous diversion by the
agents assigned to the Amerithrax investigation. Inside the Washington
field office, an FBI supervisor named Robert Roth began putting
Kristof's more outlandish statements on the wall in large letters. To
buck up his besieged agents, Roth added a statement of his own: "One of
the best things that can happen to you is to have this type of person
criticize you."

And on the 4th page, there's more:

In June of 2002, Van Harp
and three other bureau officials were summoned to the office of Leahy,
the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, only to find their
meeting turned over to Rosenberg. "For the better part of an hour she
presented her views about the letter attacks and the culpability of
Hatfill, without ever naming him," Willman writes. "When Harp tried to
press Rosenberg for concrete details, Leahy's staff cut him off."

Instead
of resisting this political pressure, the FBI knuckled under.

Yes, exactly.
Instead of resisting the political pressure to publicly investigate
Steven Hatfill, the FBI knuckled
under. And, when the FBI knucked under, in the minds of
the public and many "journalists," the FBI became responsible for everything that
happened to Dr. Hatfill. Theeight months of intense pressure
created by Dr. Rosenberg , Kristof, others in the media and various
politicians to investigate Dr.
Hatfill was simply forgotten
about. The whole Hatfill mess became the FBI's fault.June 9, 2011 (C)
- Today, the (Maryland) Gazette contains an article titled "A
treasure trove of information about Amerithrax." It should
more appropriately be titled "A treasure trove of misinformation
about Amerithrax." It's one historian's take on a 25 minute
speech giving by Paul Kemp at a Rotary Club meeting. Here's a
sample:

For instance, the FBI lost anthrax samples that Ivins
supplied to it in 2002. Several years
later, agents asked for additional samples, and Ivins used a different
method, sending a purer virus.

Kemp keeps feeding the
public total baloney about the FBI losing
the first sample Ivins supplied from flask RMR-1029. It wasn't lost. It was thrown away because Ivins didn't prepare it properly,
and it was therefore useless as evidence.

It wasn't years later that
Ivins supplied a new sample, it was two months later. "A purer
virus"!? It wasn't purer, and it wasn't a virus. It was a sample of bacteria spores.

Another example of the misinformation in the article:

Nor did the FBI get anthrax
samples from other major contractors under contract with the
government. The largest, Battelle, had a number of locations working
with anthrax, and equipment that could create an aerosol. Yet the FBI did not pursue those leads,
so certain were they that only Ivins had mailed the letters.

Totally false, of course. The FBI was investigating all
leads - including those at Battelle - long
before
the evidence started to pinpoint Bruce Ivins as the most likely
suspect. I think the article by "historian" Paul Gordon
achieves a new record for the amount of misinformation
that has been printed in a single article about the Amerithrax case.

The blurb at the top of the review says the book "lacks
structure." Hmm. Okay. So, it's not going to be LA
Times review heaping endless praise upon a book written by a former LA
Times reporter. After some other opening sentences, the reviewer
then says:

The FBI botched the anthrax investigation
so badly that it eventually paid $5.82 million to researcher Steven J.
Hatfill, targeted for years as the bureau's principal suspect amid a
flood of publicity, after a district court judge declared there was
"not a scintilla of evidence" linking Hatfill to the letters.

So it's unsurprising
that not everyone was convinced when the FBI announced on Aug. 6, 2008,
that the actual culprit was Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at the
United States Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) who had
committed suicide a week earlier.

Uh, oh! The review then says:

The circumstantial evidence
Willman lays out is strong, though
not undisputed.

Yeah, but what action by any government agency in today's
Internet-connected world goes
undisputed?
Fortunately, the reviewer doesn't describe any disputes or take any
sides. Instead, she spends a couple paragraphs describing how
Willman jumps around in time and sometimes repeats information, which
evidently makes the book somewhat difficult to follow for a person not
very familiar with the case. Wendy Smith concludes her review
with this:

By the time Willman shows
the FBI finally closing in on Ivins in the fall of 2007 and relates the
grim psychic unraveling that preceded his suicide in 2008, readers have too much information and
not enough meaningful interpretation. Willman provides good
evidence to back up his conviction that Ivins was guilty. What he
doesn't provide is a well-organized structure to unite the multiple
strands of a shocking news story into a strong full-length narrative.

Hmm. I can't disagree. I was concerned that Willman's book
would make any book I write totally redundant. But, we have very
different styles and considerably different views on what is
important. What I think would be most important in my book would be my interpretations
of the evidence, my understanding of the science, my understanding of
the public and media psychology, and a linear structure that would
make things easier to follow.

It's a very encouraging review, in that it encourages me to get back to
work on my own book. Hopefully, it's just the first of many
reviews. I'm very curious about what other reviewers might have
to say. Since reviews are just opinions,
there's no reason to believe that any two reviewers will see exactly
the same strengths and faults.

June 9, 2011 (A)
-
The Lunatic Fringe is still very active in their unyielding defense of
Bruce Ivins. One tactic used by people on The Fringe is to find
instances where a person who believes Ivins was guilty was once wrong
about something else, and
therefore, since his views were once shown
to be wrong, he or she cannot be trusted on anything. He or she is a
person who makes mistakes.
And, who would ever be silly enough to believe someone who makes
mistakes!?

This morning, I received a bizarre email from a True Believer which
said:

Ed, can you correct your
webpage all the times where you said the FBI did not suspect
Hatfill? To the contrary, the interviews establish that FBI was
fixated on Hatfill

The central premise of your webpage for 7 years was mistaken but you haven't corrected it yet. Thanks. We will want history and the record to reflect what those briefing meetings with FBI Director Mueller were like.

As with virtually all
claims from the Lunatic Fringe, this claim is
also nonsense. Most of the instances where the FBI said that
Hatfill was not a suspect were documented
headlines in newspapers, not claims of mine. But, since
Hatfill's name had not yet been made public, most of those headlines
were primarily about Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's theories regarding
Hatfill. My web page about
the attempted lynching of Steven Hatfill goes into all the details.

The argument from the True Believer seems to be that David Willman's
book somewhere says that "the FBI" suspected Hatfill. That is not true.
After Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and The New York Times had been pointing
at Hatfill for months, certain individuals
within the Department of Justice and the FBI appear to have started
suspecting or believing that Hatfill was the anthrax mailer, but there
also were many individuals within
the FBI who did NOT think
Hatfill did it.

Willman's book contains this on page 185 of the reviewers' edition:

Some
FBI hands questioned the extraordinary
investigative measures [regarding Hatfill]. Said Brad Garrett,
one of the agents who dealt directly with Hatfill, "Did it make any
sense at the time? No, it didn't. Is it overkill? I
think the answer is yes." Garret made it clear that the outsized focus on Hatfill came from
the top, not from agents working the case. "Particular
management people felt, 'He is the right guy. If only we could
put this amount of energy into him, we'll get to the end of the
rainbow.' Did it take energy away? It had to have.
Because you can't pull up another hundred agents and say, 'You go work
on these [leads] that these guys can't, because they're just focused on
Hatfill.'" [Note] 40 But looked at another way, so long as
agents were tailing him, videotaping him, and monitoring his
conversations, the FBI was preventing the presumed perpetrator from
striking again.

In other words, the focus on Hatfill was the result of pressures from
"the top," which were in turn the result of pressures from politicians
and the media. Did the people at "the top" actually believe
that Hatfill was the anthrax killer, or did they just believe that more
pressure was needed to find proof that would up in court and relieve
all the pressure? Did the agents in the FBI who believed Hatfill
was the anthrax mailer believe it because so many other people with
impressive credentials outside of the FBI believed it? Or did
they just figure he could be
the guy because they had no other viable suspects at the time?
The one thing they did not have was
evidence proving that
Hatfill was the anthrax mailer. And evidence is the
only thing that really matters in a criminal case.

It's certainly clear that some individuals
within the Department of Justice believed that Hatfill was the anthrax
mailer. In an attempt to find the sources of leaks about Dr.
Hatfill, a top lawyer in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of
Columbia, Daniel Seikaly, was caught in a sting operation conducted by the
FBI. The FBI evidently gave Seikaly false confidential information about how
the
bloodhounds had identified Hatfill's scent on the anthrax letters, and
Seikaly gave the confidential
information to Newsweek. Hatfill's
lawsuit against the FBI & DOJ has details. I described this
incident in my comment for December
23, 2007. And, in January of 2009, I made this comment on Dr.
Nass's site:

I have stated MANY times
that the FBI is NOT a Borg Collective where instantly everyone knows what
everyone else knows, and everyone believes what everyone else believes.

Any claim that "the FBI" believed Hatfill was guilty is false.
Any claim that "the FBI" believed Hatfill was innocent is false.
The reality is that individuals
within the FBI had different opinions. They probably still do.

June 8,
2011 -
Yesterday, I ordered a copy of David Willman's book "The Mirage Man"
from Amazon.com.
They say I should receive it on Friday or
Saturday.

I'm somewhat surprised that there haven't yet been any new reviews of
the book. But, I think book reviews are typically in the Sunday
editions and Sunday magazines. So, we'll see what happens on
Sunday.

Meanwhile, on Dr.
Meryl Nass's blog, one of the posters who calls himself "Anonymous"
wrote that he couldn't understand what I was claiming in my (A) comment
yesterday about finding additional evidence in a reviewers' edition of
Willman's book which further indicated that a child wrote the anthrax
letters. I responded in great detail.

In his book, David Willman doesn't say anything about a child writing the
letters. The new facts which he provides are about people Ivins knew. Some
of those facts strongly support my
hypothesis that
a child wrote the letters. (I'm being purposefully vague
because I don't want to point at a 15 or 16 year old who may not have been the letter
writer. I lack critical facts to make it anything more than a very promising hypothesis.
The writer may have been some
other child.)

I should probably give an overall opinion of "The Mirage Man." I
think it's a terrific
book. David Willman has done a masterful job of research and
vivid writing. He seems to have interviewed just about everyone
Ivins ever knew, all the way back to grade school. Willman names
sources that have never been named before - and some are very
surprising. Example: The co-worker to whom Ivins gave a
copy of Gődel, Escher Bach
was Patricia Fellows. Ivins became angry when she later told him
she hadn't read it.

It was also Fellows who was talking with Ivins when the FBI caught some
of Ivins' non-denial denials on
tape. I'd assumed it was one of his mental health
counselors. Here's what it says on page 297 of the
reviewers' edition:

Agent
Lawrence Alexander was at the FBI's
office in Frederick, listening in as the conversation [between Ivins
and Fellows] unfolded. As he followed the back-and-forth,
Alexander looked forward to the day when a jury would hear Ivins
stammering and equivocating about whether he committed the anthrax
letter attacks. That night,
Rachel Lieber listened to a tape of the conversation and resolved that
she would play excerpts from it during the opening arguments at the
future murder trial of Bruce Ivins. 6

That's just one example of information from Willman's book that has
never appeared in print before. (Note #6 contains all the details
about where Willman got the information mentioned in that paragraph.)

The book also contains a lot of information about how the silicon issue
got
started and why it has lasted so long. Numerous conspiracy
theorists are mentioned by name.

While I consider it a terrific
book, I certainly don't agree
with everything in it. But, my disagreements are over relatively
minor matters and over summations. For example, we disagree on why the bloodhounds where brought in on the
Hatfill case. Willman writes about what FBI agents told
him. I believe what the facts tell me. Also, I don't
think the case was "bungled." With
all the suspects they had, with all the pressures from inside and
outside the government, and with a devious suspect like Ivins involved,
it's really amazing that the FBI actually found the killer - even if
now, with 20-20 hindsight, it seems like it should have been obvious a
lot earlier that Ivins did it.

June 7, 2011 (B)
- As a result of my (A) comment this morning, I received a couple
emails telling me I could get a copy of David Willman's book via Kindle
or on an iPad almost instantly.

Yes, I know the book is available on Kindle and via other electronic
sources. However, I need/want a copy that I can go through with
different colored highlighters to mark passages I might need for future
reference (for my own book), plus I want to mark passages that I might
need to cite sometime on this blog. Highlighting helps me
remember things, and it helps me find things later.

I also received a bunch of emails explaining the reasoning behind the
Lunatic Fringe claim that I had abandoned my "argument that it is 99%
certain a first grader wrote the anthrax letters." It was
someone's distortion of what I wrote on January 11, 2009, when I
created my web page titled "The Facts say:
A child Wrote The Anthrax Letters":

Facts are facts,
whether they are believed or not.In the Amerithrax case, the preponderance of facts
show
very clearly that a child almost certainly
wrote the
anthrax
letters and addressed the envelopes. Yes, it is possible that
the writing is that of an adult who knew exactly how to
write like a
child in every detail. But, while that may be "possible," it
seems extremely
unlikely.

They just ignored the last sentence, distorted the meaning of
everything, and then they implied I had recently written those
paragraphs. It only took multiple distortions of the facts in
order to
make their bogus claim. And now, of course, they're discussing deletingthe
claim, so they can pretend they never made it.

The bogus claim also seems to show an inability on the part of True
Believers in the Lunatic Fringe to understand that it is possible to be
less than 100% certain about something. True Believers may be
100% certain - without any
facts to support their total certainty - that a child did NOT write the
letters, but, since I work with facts, I can't be 100% certain that
Bruce Ivins, Muslim terrorists or
aliens from outer space didn't write the letter. So, while those
alternative explanations are technically possible, the facts say they are
also extremely
unlikely.

June
7, 2011 (A)
-
Okay. The embargo is now lifted. It's okay for me to
talk freely about David
Willman's new book "The Mirage Man" (except for the fact that I haven't yet
obtained a first
edition, so I
can't be certain what was written in the advance copy also
appears in the first edition. I was just over at my local Barnes
& Noble, and they didn't have any copies in yet. No other
local book store has copies, either.).

Ed Lake at some point
abandoned his argument that it is 99% certain a first grader wrote the
anthrax letters. His position now is alternatively that the perpetrator
was merely making it look like a child’s writing.

Where do the people on
the Lunatic Fringe get such total
nonsense!? Do I have to talk about a subject every day to avoid having them
claim I've changed my mind? If I talk about something every day,
they'll just claim I'm "obsessed," and therefore not to be
trusted. There was nothing new
about the subject of the handwriting on the anthrax letters for a long
time, so what would there be for me to say - unless someone else
brought up the subject?

Also, I've been waiting for the embargo to be lifted so I can discuss
the new
information in David Willman's book.

Although Willman himself appears to believe that Ivins wrote the
anthrax letters and somehow disguised his handwriting, possibly by
writing with the "wrong hand," there are new
facts in his book which
virtually pinpoint the 6-year-old child who
Ivins almost certainly talked into writing the letters and addressing
the envelopes.

The child is so clearly
identified (if you are looking at facts
showing that a child wrote the anthrax letters and not
ignoring those facts because they don't support your beliefs), that I
have to wonder: Does the FBI know
who the letter writer is? Are they
withholding the information because it could ruin the child's
life?
Since Bruce Ivins is dead, what point is there in turning an innocent
16 year old into "The boy who wrote
the anthrax letters" in headlines all over the world?

On the other hand, the
child and his parents might be totally unaware
that all the evidence says that a child wrote the letters. The
child may
never have seen the anthrax letters on TV. (What sort of
6-year-old
child watches The Evening News?) And the parents may have been
assuming for 10 years that some Muslim wrote the letters.

The new
facts in Willman's book explain so
much. Among other facts, the reason the handwriting was so good
for a first grader seems to be explained: The child's mother is a schoolteacher.

The new facts in Willman's book leave only one missing piece to the
puzzle. And, therefore, there is
still a possibility that the letter writer was some other
first grader in Diane Ivins' day care center during that time -- and the remote possibility
that Ivins wrote the letters himself.

The one unanswered
question is: Did the schoolteacher actually have a six year old child at the
time
of the mailings?June 6, 2011 - McClatchy
newspapers today include a version of David Willman's most recent
article. Yesterday, it was in the Sacremento
Bee. Both are just edited versions of what AP and the
Charleston Gazette released on the 3rd.

June 5, 2011 (B)
- In this morning's (A) comment, I used the term "argument
from ignorance," probably for the first time. I feel
like I should have been using it a hundred times a day for the past ten
years.

Argument from ignorance,
also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or "appeal to
ignorance", is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true
because it has not been proven false (or vice versa).

The Lunatic Fringe argues that Ivins' notebooks show he was doing
normal work in those evenings for which he had no explanations.
They feel they do not need to show how
the notebooks show he was doing normal work. Their argument is:
if you cannot prove their statement is false, that means their
statement is true. The same with the "autoclave ticker
tape." If you can't prove the autoclave ticker tape is not relevant to the case, then it is relevent to the case, nevermind
how. The "argument of ignorance" tactic turns the burden of proof
over to their opponents. The Lunatic Fringe doesn't have to prove
anything. It's up to their opponents to prove them wrong.
If their opponents can't prove them wrong - or if their opponents can't
be bothered to do so - that means the Lunatic Fringe is right.

If you are old enough to remember Senator Joe McCarthy, "argument from
ignorance" was a
favorite tactic of his:

[Joe McCarthy] announced
that he had penetrated "Truman's iron curtain of secrecy" and that he
proposed forthwith to present 81 cases… Cases of exactly what? "I am
only giving the Senate," he said, "cases in which it is clear there is
a definite Communist connection…persons
whom I consider to be Communists in the State Department." … Of
Case 40, he said, "I do not have much information on this except the
general statement of the agency…that there is nothing in the files to
disprove his Communist connections."

And it was up to others to prove McCarthy wrong. If they didn't,
to McCarthy and his followers that meant he was right.

Another term to use when discussing the arguments from the Lunatic
Fringe might be "argument
from incredulity," which is basically their argument: If they
cannot believe it, then
it cannot be true.June
5, 2011 (A) -
I think the argument I've been having with Southack
on FreeRepublic.com has run its course and has served its
purpose. Anyone who has read the thread should be able to see
that
there are no facts which will convince Southack that the anthrax which
contaminated the AMI building was not on the money paid as rent by 9/11
hijackers to a woman whose husband worked at AMI.

The discussion/argument began on May 22, and ended the only way it
could end, with me allowing Southack to have the last word yesterday,
June
4. With about 40 arguments from me and just 1 from Southack
stated over and over about 40 times, it should be clear that
further discussion on this particular subject is pointless.

Meanwhile, on
Dr. Meryl Nass's web site, someone who calls himself "Anonymous,"
but who is not the same
"Anonymous" who wrote other messages in the same thread, continued to
argue that Ivins was a nice guy and that all his burglaries, vandalism
and despicable acts against co-workers and former colleagues mean
nothing. According to the thinking of "Anonymous," if Bruce Ivins
never committed murder before 2001, then
it's clearly not possible for him to have committed the anthrax
murders in 2001.

I
wrote: Ivins was a case study of a man who kept countless
secrets from his "friends" and co-workers and manipulated them into
believing he was just a harmless eccentric.

Anonymous responded:
I
don't see that as a bad thing. If I have a coworker who has chronic,
say, flatulence, would I need to know that?!? I mean other than finding
out by being in a smallish office or lab? Some things are
private/personal, even intensely so.

Does one need to know
that a
co-worker will make a copy of the key to your home if you leave the key
unattended?
Does one need to know that a co-worker will steal your computer
password and read your emails if you aren't careful?
Does one need to know that a co-worker will vandalize your car and
property if he's in a bad mood?
Does one need to know that a co-worker will try to destroy your career
if he feels you ignore him?
Does one need to know that a co-worker will plot to poison you if you
don't treat him correctly?

"Anonymous" suggests that none of this is any more serious than farting
while at work. And, it appears that - like Southack - no amount
of evidence or arguing is going to change his (or her) mind. That
particular discussion ended with what appears to be a personal attack
(using something I said about Ivins, and turning it upon me).

Meanwhile, on Lew
Weinstein's web site, where I'm banned from posting, the argument
continues to be that nothing the FBI used as evidence is really
evidence if people on that site don't believe it is evidence, or if
they have merely commented on it. If they
have used the Freedom Of Information Act to obtain a document that
shows Ivins had no explanation for working long hours alone in his lab
at night during the times the attack anthrax powders were made, but
they believe that there is an
explanation in the document somewhere, then the FBI's findings are null
and void. All they need is to believe
that the document somehow proves their beliefs, and it becomes proof of their beliefs -
regardless of what the document actually says. And
anyone who disagrees is just a "shill" for the FBI.

This morning, I found a couple emails in my inbox from a regular poster
on Weinstein's site. One email said:

the
reason you have no
credibility is that in addition to not seeking documents, you don't
consult with experts (someone not qualified in the field should always
consult with experts)

Really? It seems to me that I
have been consulting with experts for
ten years on just about everything. At one time or
another, I've consulted with just about every key scientist who was
free to talk about the case (and I've read what many many more experts have
written). But, that doesn't mean I'm only parroting what those
experts believe or tell me. When experts do not address a
subject or cannot agree on a subject, I will put facts together myself and
explain on this web site exactly what the facts say. And, I'll
wait to see if any expert can prove me wrong. The Anthrax
Truthers, on the other hand, find an "expert" who agrees with them, and
they consider that "expert's" opinion to be gospel, even if everything
he or she says can be easily proven wrong.

The other email I received this morning said:

why did you fail to request
the autoclave ticker tape? what purpose is served by internet
posters who just get things wrong by a failure to seek the best
evidence?

Why did I fail to request the
autoclave ticker tape? Probably for
the same reason I failed to request access to the menu in the base
cafeteria: It wouldn't answer any relevant
question I saw as being in need of an answer.

That seems to be another tactic of the Lunatic Fringe. They
blindly "fish" for evidence
to support their beliefs. As a result, they frequently point at
things that have no apparent relevance - like the autoclave ticker tape
- and they declare that it could
or does mean something.
They dare others to prove it does not
mean anything. If the others
cannot or don't have time to argue that the information is not relevant
(who can "prove the negative" about anything?), the
Lunatic Fringe will declare that means it is relevant, even if no Truther can
explain how it is
relevant. It's an "argument
from ignorance."

Argument from ignorance,
also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or "appeal to
ignorance", is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true
because it has not been proven false (or vice versa).

I'm a researcher and an analyst. I evaluate the evidence supplied
by
experts and sources with solid facts. I develop an hypothesis
which
explains all the known
facts. I then ask everyone to show me where my hypothesis is
wrong. If they can do
so (they are rarely able to do so), I revise the hypothesis so that it
incorporates the new information.

If some expert publishes information that does not agree with my
hypothesis, I will usually write a comment for my web site explaining
the "expert's" point of view. Then I present my evidence, and I
show how my evidence is supported by the facts, while the "expert's"
point of view appears to be largely based upon opinions or anonymous
sources. And, I'm open to further discussions of the
subject.

That's the situation as we begin the week where David Willman's new
book "The Mirage Man" goes on sale (on June 7). Reviewers
and journalists have been generally embargoed from reviewing the book
or citing from it until after it goes on sale, and so have
I. Anthrax Truthers, however, haven't been embargoed and/or
don't care
about embargoes, so one of them has been citing passage after passage
from Willman's book - out of context
-
and inexplicably
plopping the quotes into old threads where a specific subject was
previously mentioned. The idea seems to be that if some subject
was
previously mentioned by an Anthrax Truther, then the quote has some
relevance, even if the previous mention had no apparent relevance to
anything.

Sometimes, going through the babble from the Lunatic Fringe is like
trying to decipher a book about toe nail cleaning that was written in
Sanskrit. Is it really
worth the effort? Do I really need
to know what they're trying to
say?

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 29, 2011, thru Saturday, June 4, 2011June 4, 2011 (C)
- I still can't figure out why the
Lunatic Fringe believes that Ivins' notebooks show anything other
that what the FBI stated they showed about his late evening hours in
the BSL-3 lab. Yet, the
Lunatic Fringe just keeps claiming that the notebooks say things
that the notebooks clearly do not say.

So, rather than repeat what I wrote on June 2, I've moved that comment
here, and I've expanded upon it - mainly by adding the image of the
page from the notebook that they inexplicably seem to believe proves
something.

They seem to
believe that because Bruce Ivins' note books show that he was doing
routine work
during the days
when he
also worked alone in the BSL-3 lab in the evenings
without a good explanation, that somehow proves that Ivins was doing
routine and legitimate work on those evenings.

Of course, the lab notebooks show no such thing. And there
is no logic to the claims from the Lunatic Fringe.

When
confronted with his suspicious pattern of hours worked in the lab, Dr.
Ivins’s only explanation was that he “liked to go there to get away
from a difficult home life.” He
could not give a legitimate, science-related reason for being there
during these hours, and none was documented in any of his lab notebooks.
21

And Note 21 at the bottom of the page says:

21
It bears mention that during the first five days of this second phase,
Dr. Ivins did make notations regarding the health of some mice involved
in a study being conducted by another colleague – thus justifying his
presence in the lab for a short time on each of those days (Friday,
September 28 through Tuesday, October 2). However, the first three of
those days, he was in the hot suites for well over an hour, far longer
than necessary to check to see if any mice were dead. And
for the three nights before each mailing window, Dr. Ivins was in the
hot suites for between two and four hours each night, with absolutely
no explanation.

Yet, somehow, the Lunatic Fringe "researchers" can see "evidence" in
the
notebooks that Ivins was working hard at legitimate USAMRIID duties on
those evenings. They used FOIA requests to get copies of the
notebooks, and they've been discussing them on Lew Weinstein's web site
for months.One
thread shows a page from a notebook. That thread contains
their
version of the page they think is so important:

As anyone should be able to see, the notebook page indicates some times
when Ivins was checking for
dead mice and rabbits in the evenings. On Tuesday, October 2, the
notebook page indicates that Ivins checked on the mice at 10 p.m. (2200
hours) and evidently found that 2 mice were dead in one of the
experiments. Moreover, the in-out logs show that on that
evening
he only worked 23
minutes in the
BSL-3 lab. So, it's reasonable to believe that he only went in to
check on the mice. It doesn't take long to check for dead
animals, so,
most of the 23 minutes were probably spent in the shower after he left
the BSL-3 lab. This confirmswhat
the FBI Summary Report said.

Also confirming what the FBI
Summary Report said, on the 3rd, 4th and
5th of October, when Ivins would have been busy working on the creating
the
anthrax powders for the letters, the notebook page shows absolutely no
evening times spent on checking on mice and rabbits. All
animal checking was done during his normal
daytime work.
Yet, somehow the Lunatic Fringe sees an
explanation for Ivins spending 2 hours and 58 minutes in the BSL-3 lab
on the evening of the 3rd,
2 hours and 33 minutes on the 4th, and 3 hours and 42 minutes on the
5th. How is it explained? They don't say.
It appears that they they consider it so obvious that they don't need to explain
it to anyone. (They seem to believe that "explaining" is the same
as "pontificating.")

According to the Lunatic Fringe, I'm not a researcher, I'm a
pontificator. But, you
don't have to be a researcher to see that the notebook page confirms what the FBI said in the
Summary Report and disputes the total nonsense from the Lunatic Fringe.June 4, 2011 (B)
- The
Frederick News-Post has once again printed lawyer Barry Kissin's
opinion about the Amerithrax investigation. Kissin's wildly
uninformed and misinformed opinion is, as always, that the attack
anthrax was weaponized in some
super-sophisticated way that Bruce Ivins couldn't possibly have
been able to replicate. Mr. Kissin asks:

As of 2001, did the Army at
Fort Detrick have the equipment and expertise necessary to create the
attack anthrax -- anthrax powder of unprecedented purity and as
dispersible as a gas? If not, who did have such equipment and
expertise? Is there a legitimate purpose for such equipment and
expertise? Has the program involving such equipment and expertise been
terminated, or is the program being expanded as a part of the ongoing
expansion taking place at Detrick?

Yes, Mr. Kissin, Bruce Ivins was making pure spores virtually every dayvery much like what was in the
letters mailed to the two senators, and he was throwing out the kind of
junk that was sent to the media. So, "unprecedented" is hardly a
valid term to use for what Bruce Ivins was creating. The only
additional task Ivins needed to do was to dry the spores, and Ivins knew multiple ways to do that
- including ways that Mr. Kissin probably uses whenever he needs to dry
something that is wet. Believing that something is difficult
doesn't make it difficult.

And, Bruce Ivins also knew how to cause silicon to be incorporated into
spore coats (although he probably didn't know he knew it), since he
created the spores for flask RMR-1030, and that flask
contained spores with silicon in their coats exactly like what was in the attack
anthrax. So, any claim that Ivins couldn't do it is
just plain false.

Mr. Kissin also reports that Bruce Ivins' former lawyer, Paul Kemp,
recently gave a lecture at a Rotary Club meeting where Mr. Kemp talked
about the Amerithrax investigation, and - according to Mr. Kissin -
Kemp demolished the FBI's case and pointed the finger at
Battelle. Mr. Kemp's reasoning is the same as Mr. Kissin's: Ivins didn't know how to do things he did
every day. That's the kind of illogical
reasoning the defenders of Bruce Ivins somehow see as logical.

June
4, 2011 (A)
- David Willman has written another article utilizing material from his
new book. This article was evidently written for the Sacramento
Bee, it was distributed by the Associated Press for release
tomorrow (Sunday, June 5) but McClatchy newspapers (The Charleston
Gazette) released it yesterday,
complete with notations
about what the AP says can be cut to make the article shorter if some
newspaper wishes to do so. The article is titled "The anthrax
scare and one deeply troubled man." Here are a couple
paragraphs:

My research for a book about
the attacks found that misinformation
continues to distort many of the essential details. Based on my
review of thousands of pages of documents related to the FBI-led
anthrax investigation, including the results of genetic and chemical
tests, along with my hundreds of interviews with those most familiar
with the evidence, there is no
credible indication of foreign involvement in America's worst-ever
brush with biological terrorism.

Indeed, the evidence points most
convincingly to one of our own - a trusted Army scientist at what was
presumed to be the most secure of American biodefense facilities.

It's been a very busy week
for people interested in this subject. I wonder what next week
will be like.June 3,
2011 -
This morning, The
Daily Beast contains what is described as an "excerpt" from David
Willman's new book "The Mirage Man." It appears to be several
excerpts with some new text added to bind the excerpts together.
One section of the article describes how, in July of 2000, Bruce Ivins
told his mental health counselor Judith M. McLean that he had planned
to poison a young woman named Mara:

McLean learned from Ivins
that he was an accomplished scientist and had access to dangerous
substances, but she did not know anthrax was among them. ..... He said he had sometimes committed acts
of anonymous vandalism against those who wronged him. Ivins had earlier told a psychiatrist that
he carried a loaded gun at college. Imagining stationary objects inside
of buildings as his enemies, he said he fired at them, once destroying
a wall clock. ....

On the afternoon of July 18,
2000, Ivins arrived for his fourth session with McLean. They began
discussing anew his obsession with Mara. He said he felt deeply
attached to her, but she did not show the same interest in him. She was
not responding regularly to his e-mails, and this angered him.

In a matter-of-fact manner,
Ivins described how he had driven recently to upstate New York to watch
Mara play in a soccer match, and how he had
brought along a jug of wine that he had spiked with poison. If Mara had
not been injured during the match, he would have offered her the wine
when they met for a casual visit afterward. He had the
ability, he told McLean, to create “lethal poisons” and the expertise
to use them for revenge.

He said he saw himself as an
“avenging angel of death.”

After the session, McLean
tried to get advice from the owner of the clinic and from other senior
members on what to do about Ivins. She called the Frederick
Police Department, but they told her that it didn't sound like any
actual crime had been committed. McLean then called the clinic's
lawyer, and he told her the same thing.

Much of this was described (without the counselor's name and other
critical details) in The
Washington Post back in August of 2008. The Anthrax Truthers
tried to say the counselor in 2000 was Jean
Duley, who they do not like and feel free to attack as
untrustworthy. The fact that Duley didn't meet Ivins until 2008
is irrelevant to the Truthers.

The Anthrax Truthers seem to spend all day every day trying to find
ways to dismiss as "biased" anyone who says anything bad about Bruce
Ivins.

Dr.
David Irwin is dismissed as biased because he is a "forensic
psychiatrist," which they believe means he works for the FBI. In
reality, it just means he's qualified to testify in court (for the
defense or prosecution) about
psychiatric mental problems and their symptoms.

The Anthrax Truthers routinely attack the head of the Expert Behavioral
Analysis Panel, Dr.
Gregory Saathoff, as being in cahoots with the FBI and, therefore,
incapable of giving an "independent" opinion.

The Truthers argue that nothing Ivins said or did prior to September of
2001 has any bearing on whether or not he committed the anthrax attacks
in 2001. But, then, because they ignore all past deeds by Ivins,
they try to argue that there's no reason to believe that a nice guy like Bruce Ivins would
commit such a crime. In court, the claim that Ivins was a "nice
guy" would bring Ivins' character into question (was he a "nice guy" or
wasn't he?), and that would allow all of his past crimes to be shown as
part of his character. The Truthers want to be able to say
Ivins was a "nice guy" without anyone proving otherwise. Anyone
who proves otherwise is "biased."

I've got a feeling that when David Willman's book comes out on June 7,
there will be a LOT of new discussion in the media about Ivins and the
anthrax attacks. It will be interesting to see what "media
experts" have to say, particularly the experts who have made headlines
by trying to cast doubt upon the FBI's findings that Ivins was the
anthrax mailer.

June 2, 2011 (B)
- For the record, the reason I'm writing about my emails here is
because I see no point in arguing with some members of the
Lunatic Fringe in private. The primary purpose of arguing with
the Lunatic Fringe is to show the
worldwhy they are
known as
"The Lunatic Fringe." Private arguments won't do
that. (My public argument with Southack on FreeRepublic.com
continues to show very good examples of Lunatic Fringe reasoning.
My arguments on Dr.
Meryl Nass's web site don't always get posted, and when they do,
they get delayed for hours or days. And, I have to be very careful to not say anything
Dr. Nass might not approve of. That makes it difficult to have a
good argument.)

June 2, 2011 (A)
-
Of all the weird blatherings expressed by the Lunatic Fringe on Lew
Weinstein's web site over the years, one of the weirdest is the complaint that the
FBI is keeping secret which scientific article Ivins sent to an FBI
agent on August 4, 2004. I'm only mentioning it now because the lunatics have started sending me
emails about it.

On August 4, 2004, BRUCE
IVINS of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of
Infections Diseases (USAMRIID), Ft. Detrick, Maryland, telephonically
contacted Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) XXXXXXX of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI). IVINS reported that XXXXXX also of
USAMRIID, had provided him with a
scientific article abstract about Bacillus spore suspensions in which the
addition of silica to the spore coat was discussed. IVINS
offered to send the abstract via facsimile to SSA XXXXXX and
subsequently sent the abstract to the FBI offsite in Frederick,
Maryland. The cover sheet and the article abstract are maintained
in the 1A section of the file.

Years ago, when I read that paragraph in the FBI report, that's what I
figured, too. It was probably one of the two articles from 1980
which were being discussed around that time, articles which described
how silicon had been discovered in the coats of Bacillus spores. Here's part
of a comment I wrote on March 10,
2004:

Fact #8: In 1980 two
scientific papers were written about finding
silicon in spores similar to anthrax - spores of Bacillus cereus and
spores
of Bacillus megaterium. The papers included speculation that the
silicon may have come from glass containers, but in one paper logic
seemed
to indicate that wasn’t true, and no true investigation was performed
to
figure out exactly where the silicon did come from. The two
papers
are:

What's so weird is that this blathering isn't about something Ivins
wrote, it's just about an article he
sent to an FBI agent. The Lunatic Fringe somehow thinks
it's of vast importance to know exactly what article it was, and
they're working themselves into a lather over it. They're even
sending me emails trying to get me worked up over it.

Why are they so worked up over it? They won't say. They
don't explain anything they get worked up over. They just
consider anyone who doesn't get worked up over what they are worked up
over to be ignorant and biased.

May
31, 2011 -
Nuts! I can't stop thinking about the three
evolutionary theories which explain how Bacillus
anthracis bacteria developed the ability to utilize silicon when
forming spore coats: (1)the acid theory, (2) the structural integrity
theory, and (3) the ultaviolet light theory.

In my (B) comment on Sunday, I wrote "the acid theory only involves spores that
go through an animal's stomach."

That seems to be the wrong way
to describe my problem with the "acid theory."

The problem seems
to be
that the "acid theory" implies that
anthrax spores were all being
killed by stomach acids
before "Spore A" showed up.
Because "Spore A" had by pure chance
developed DNA that utilized silicon, this single spore was able to
survive the acid in an animal's stomach, and it was thus able to
produce millions and billions of descendants that also had the same
ability to survive acid baths. Not only that, "Spore A" was
also a super-spore, powerful enough to overwhelm the animal's immune
system all by itself.

That's not
evolution,
that's creationism. A mysterious force gave "Spore A" all the
powers it needed to survive.My "ultraviolet
light
hypothesis," on the other hand, begins with a key
fact: Spores form in a silicon-rich
environment. Anthrax spores form in silicon-rich blood
that has
spilled on
silicon-rich soil.

Spores do not form inside an animal's body. Spores are
ingested when the animal gobbles them up while grazing. Inside
the animal's body, they germinate into living bacteria, and the
bacteria start reproducing and reproducing. Then, the animal gets sick,
and
the tens of billions of living
bacteria in its blood, excrement and vomit get
spilled on the ground. The living
bacteria can not survive or reproduce on the
ground, so the bacteria begin to form spores. Meanwhile, UV rays
in
sunlight proceed to kill every bacterium that is exposed to sunlight
before it can produce a spore. And, even if the bacterium can
produce a spore, every spore that is exposed to sunlight is also
killed, just more slowly. That means that the only spores which
survive are those
which were formed out of direct sunlight, plus those which took up
enough silicon from the silicon rich environment to create a protective
spore
coat that would absorb UV light until winds, weather and shuffling feet
of other animals moved them out
of the
direct
sunlight.

So, plenty of Bacillus anthracis
spores were already surviving before they
started utilizing silicon in their spore coats. The silicon in
their spore coat just enabled them to
increase their numbers.
And, if the silicon also gave additional protection to help survive the
acid
in a cow's stomach, so much the better. But it was the
increased UV ray
protection provided by silicon that allowed Evolution to gradually
increase the survival rates for Bacillus
anthracis.

And the third theory, the "structural integrity hypothesis" doesn't
explain why spores
were dying due to lack of structural integrity before they started
utilizing silicon in their spore coats to give them better "structural
integrity." Today's lab produced spores do not have silicon
in their spore coats, yet they seem to survive okay.

Back on November
24,
2010, anthrax weaponization expert, Sergei Popov,
sent me an email that said:

Any
purposeful process
can occur in nature if the conditions are met. Traces of silicate in
soil-grown
culture, for example, will give you a signature similar to the
intentional
addition of silicate.

Yes, I definitely prefer the ultraviolet light hypothesis to the acid
hypothesis and the structural
intergrity hypothesis.May
29, 2011 (C)
- After
I had posted this morning's (B) comment, someone reminded me of what a weaponized spore that is coated
with silica particles looks like. It looks like this:

Clearly, the heavy coating of tiny silica particles would not only
prevent the spore
from sticking to other spores, the silica would also protect the spore from ultraviolet
rays, allowing the spore to be blown
around on a battlefield for days or even weeks before UV
rays from sunlight would render it harmless. Groan! Now I'm
wondering how long it will take the conspiracy theorists to latch onto
this and start arguing that the 2001 attack spores were "weaponized" by
growing them in a way that would protect them from UV rays - just like
what happens in nature. The only counter argument I can
think of at the moment is that Nature probably does a better job, since
only 65% to 75% of the attack spores had measurable silicon inside
their spore coats. And, the Dugway weaponization method used in
the picture above coated nearly 100% of the spores,
plus it obviously does a much
better job of UV protection. So, why would anyone develop a
"sophisticated" new method
that obviously doesn't work anywhere near as well as the old method?May 29, 2011 (B)
- I
spent much of last week involved in various arguments about
anthrax. One
absurd argument with Southack
on FreeRepublic.com went on for
days. It's still going on. The problem is: If I stop
arguing, Southack will claim victory by saying I had ran out of
arguments and thereby acknowledged that he is right.

Albert Einstein supposedly defined insanity this way:
"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different
results."

My arguments with Southack might seem like doing the
same thing over and over, but if you look closely, you'll see that I
try slightly different arguments each time. In the process, I
sometimes discover really good
arguments that he must ignore because he cannot provide a counter
argument. I realized, for example, that his theory that the
AMI building was contaminated with anthrax spores that were on money
the 9/11 hijackers
paid as rent to a woman whose husband worked at AMI requires that the
money be covered with about a teaspoonful of spore powder. How
can that be? Southack argued that the anthrax spores on the money
were invisible to the naked eye, yet there were enough to contaminate
the entire building, to give Ernesto Blanco inhalation anthrax, and to
kill Bob Stevens. He could not counter my argument, so he
was forced to invent a rent payment envelope that contained the money
and the
anthrax.

I only spent about 20 to 30 minutes per day on those arguments.
The
idea
is to leave a record on FreeRepublic.com showing that no amount of
evidence can change the mind of a True
Believer.

A different - and in some ways better - argument took place on Dr.
Nass's
web
site where someone who calls himself "Savage
Henry"
brought up the subject of evolution
and how evolution somehow created a
need for anthrax spores
to utilize silicon. His theory was that it helped the spores to
aerosolize and infect new victims:

I was wondering if the
incorporation of Silica into the Anthrax spore coat was a more natural
evolutionary occurrence then we realized. The silicon improves the
Anthrax organisms survivability; allowing
it to spread easier in this windy and dusty environment? Silica
anti-static properties additives needed for "weaponization of anthrax"
may have been "discovered" by the magic hands of evolution long before
our closest living relatives had opposable thumbs or developed secrets
crushes on the hot girls gone wild over at "KAPPA KAPPA GAMMA" cave?

To my surprise, Dr. Nass allowed my
response to get posted. I debunked "Savage Henry's" beliefs
one by one.

But, in the process of that debunking, I speculated about a different
evolutionary reason
why
the Bacillus anthracis
bacterium might utilize silicon when forming a spore coat:

The siliCON (NOT siliCA)
incorporated into the spore coat probably
has something to do with evolution, but not with blowing in the wind.
It probably has to do with
helping to harden the spore coat to protect the core and DNA inside.

That idea about hardening the spore coat came from a comment I wrote
back
on February 14 & 15, 2010.
A
scientific paper from Japan had theorized that the ability to
incorporate silicon in a spore coat came from an evolutionary need to
allow spores to survive the acids in a grazing animal's stomach in
order to infect the animal later in the digestive process. That
hypothesis was countered by an
opinion from Peter Setlow who suggested Bacillus
bacteria may have evolved to
utilize silicon in their
spore coats to provide structural
rigidity.
I preferred that theory to the acid theory, probably because the
structural rigidity theory seemingly incorporates all
Bacillus spores, while the acid theory only involves spores that
go through an animal's stomach.

After posting my response to Savage Henry's comment, I headed to my
health club for a workout. As happens very often, while I was on
the treadmill, I began to think about what I'd posted that
morning. What I had written to Savage
Henry began turning over and over in my mind. My use of the word
"probably" nagged at me. Something else was in the back of my
mind that seemed to be an even better
reason for Bacillus anthracis
to utilize silicon in its spore coat.

I recalled a discussion from many years ago where I argued that
ultraviolet rays
in sunlight killed anthrax spores, and someone
else argued that anthrax "spores are highly resistant to sunlight,
heat and disinfectants."
Subsequent research, of course, showed that UV rays in
sunlight do indeed kill spores, but it can take hours of exposure for
it to happen.

Then I recalled that the pass-through boxes in BioSafety Level 3
laboratories use ultraviolet light to sterilize the boxes between
uses. That seemed like solid proof that UV light kills anthrax
spores
fairly quickly.

However, it evidently takes a lot longer for sunlight to kill anthrax
spores than
for the concentrated UV light in pass-boxes to kill anthrax
spores.

When I got home, I tried to find where I'd had that old argument.
I couldn't find it. It was probably in some forum
discussion somewhere, since it
wasn't mentioned in any comment I made for this web site. The
only comment I found mentioning ultraviolet light was something I wrote
on June 23, 2003 about Bacillus thuringiensis:

It’s routine to coat Bt
spores
with various kinds
of starches to protect them from ultraviolet rays of the sun when the
spores
are sprayed on plants as a pesticide.

I kept wondering: Does the
silicon in the
spore coat help protect anthrax spores from ultraviolet
light?
That made me think again about the difference between spores grown in
nature and spores grown in labs. If spores grown in labs don't
typically have as much silicon in their spore coats, they could be more
easily
killed by the UV lights in the pass-through boxes.

Ultraviolet light is usually absorbed
by silicon and
converted into heat, but we found a way to make silicon devices that
absorb ultraviolet light and produce electrical current instead.

But, that's out of context. I could find nothing about silicon in spore
coats protecting spores from UV light. However, it seems to be a much better
hypothesis
than
both the structural rigidity hypothesis and
the stomach acid hypothesis. As stated above, the stomach acid
theory
doesn't apply to all spores. The structural rigidity theory
seemingly applies to all spores, but how many spores are actually
killed because their nut hard spore coats aren't hard enough? The
UV light
theory provides a true
life-or-death reason for Bacillus
anthracis to utilize silicon. It applies to every spore
that gets exposed to sunlight. Spores with silicon in
their spore coats could
survive in sunlight longer than spores without
silicon in their spore coats. Thus the spores which utilize
silicon can pass that ability on to their descendants. It's basic
evolutionary reasoning.

But, is it true?
As of this moment, it's just an hypothesis that nicely explains a lot
of known
facts. And that hypothesis is tied to another hypothesis which
nicely explains a lot of additional facts. i.e., my hypothesis that
Ivins grew
the attack spores in autoclave bags at room temperature, which
simulated natural conditions
versus laboratory conditions.
After the Memorial Day holiday, I'll send this hypothesis off to a few
scientists who have showed interest in this subject matter in the past,
with the hope that they'll find it interesting enough to try to dig up
the
funding to see if they can find definitive answers.

But, first they'd have to validate my first hypothesis: that the attack
spores were grown at room temperature, and that caused more of the
bacteria to incorporate silicon into the spore coats.
They'd probably need to prove that hypothesis in order to routinely
grow a high
percentage
of spores with silicon in their spore coats.

Once they have a reliable method of growing significant numbers of
spores with silicon in their spore coats, they can then compare how
those spores survive exposure to UV light compared to spores with no
silicon in their spore coats.

At the rate that kind of research seems to go, the results should be
available
sometime
in the year 2030. Groan!

May
29, 2011 (A)
- This morning, the Los Angeles Times contains a lengthy article by
David Willman titled "The
anthrax killings: A troubled mind." After describing some of
Bruce Ivins' bizarre (and sometimes criminal) actions, the article has
this paragraph:

This was the side of
himself that Ivins kept carefully hidden. He devised sneaky ways to strike
anonymously at people or institutions he imagined had offended him. He
harbored murderous fantasies about women who did not reciprocate his
overtures. He bought bomb-making ingredients and kept firearms,
ammunition and body armor in his basement.

Yet Ivins managed to work his way into the heart of the American
biodefense establishment, becoming a respected Army scientist and an
authority on the laboratory use of anthrax.

The article is essentially
a overview of Willman's new
book "The Mirage Man," which will go on sale June 7. The
article contains only a few hints of all the fascinating details about
Ivins and the Amerithrax investigation that are included in the book,
which is already driving some of the Anthrax
Truthers into a lathered frenzy. I can't wait to see what
kind of controversy it starts when the book goes on sale and everyone
can start going through all of Willman's detailed findings.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 22, 2011, thru Saturday, May 28, 2011

May 27, 2011 - Greg
Gordon of McClatchy Newspapers has reported on the letter that Rep.
Jerrold Nadler of New York sent to FBI Director Mueller. Voicing
and repeating doubts about the FBI's anthrax investigation seems to be
Greg Gordon's current project. His article concludes with some
new information:

The FBI said the bureau had
received the letter and would respond directly to Nadler.

Will Rep. Nadler provide
the FBI's response letter to the public? Time will tell.
Will it satisfy Nadler? Unlikely.May 26, 2011 -
Hmm. Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York just
wrote a letter to FBI
Director Mueller complaining that Nadler wasn't given all the facts
about the silicon that was detected in the anthrax letters back in
2001.

On November 26, 2008, I
sent to you this follow-up question in writing: “What was the percentage of weight of
the silicon in the powder used in the 2001 anthrax attacks?”

On April 17, 2009,
then-Acting Assistant Attorney General M. Faith Burton, of the DOJ
Office of Legislative Affairs, responded with the following answer:

FBI
Laboratory results indicated that
the spore powder on the Leahy letter contained 14,470 ppm of silicon
(1.4%). The spore powder on the New York Post letter was found
to have silicon present in the sample; however, due to the limited
amount of material, a reliable quantitative measurement was not
possible. Insufficient quantifies of spore powder on both the Daschle
and Brokaw letters precluded analysis of those samples.

A February 15, 2011 report by
the National Academy of Sciences (“NAS report”), in which the NAS
included its review of the FBI’s data and scientific analysis in the
anthrax investigation, raises three questions about this DOJ/FBI
response to me. First, with respect to the anthrax on the letter sent
to Senator Leahy, the NAS report shows on pages 66 and 67 (Table 4.4)
that the silicon content found by
the FBI was 1.4% in one sample and 1.8% in a second sample. Why were both figures not provided to me in
response to my questions?

Nadler seems to be upset
that he wasn't told that one sample indicated 1.4% and another sample
indicated 1.8%. He was only told about the lower percentage.
And he complains that
the FBI gave information to
the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that they didn't give to
him. The letter continues:

Second, the NAS report shows
on pages 66 and 67 (Table 4.4) that
the FBI found the silicon content in the New York Post letter anthrax
to be 10% when the bulk material was measured by mass and 1-2% when
individual spore coats were measured by mass per spore. Why was neither
piece of data provided to me in response to my questions?

Third and finally, the NAS
report raises questions about the appropriateness of the measurements
taken of the anthrax on the letter to the New York Post. Specifically,
on page 77, the NAS report says:

ICP-OES analysis indicated a silicon
content of the bulk New York Post letter material of 10 percent by
mass, while SEM-EDX performed by SNL demonstrated silicon in individual
spore coats at a level corresponding to 1 percent by mass per spore.
At the January 2011 meeting, the FBI attributed this difference to a
limited amount of sample available (only one replicate was performed
for ICP-OES analysis) and the
heterogeneous character of the New York Post letter. An explanation based on the
heterogeneous character implies that the specific samples analyzed were
not representative of the letter material. In such a case,
additional samples should have been analyzed to determine
representativeness. If such data exist, they were not provided to the
committee. Lacking this information, one cannot rule out the
intentional addition of a silicon-based substance to the New York Post
letter, in a failed attempt to enhance dispersion. The committee notes
that powders with dispersion characteristics similar to the letter
material could be produced without the addition of a dispersant.

I thought that some scientists I've exchanged emails with had been
working on getting answers to these unanswered questions, but it turned
out that they can't work on anything without funding. So, what
Rep. Nadler really needs to do is get funding for some lab (or
multiple labs) to work on finding the answers to his questions.

The answers seem simple enough, but proving it to people who believe
the
anthrax was weaponized will
be difficult.

In layman's terms, the biggest problem is that no one has officially
explained why the New York Post powder contained pieces of material
that seemed to be about 10%
silicon. The problem and the answer are almost
certainly found in the
fact that the NY Post powder was "heterogeneous."

Heterogenous means that it was composed of unlike parts or
elements, i.e., there was substance A in the powder, plus substance B,
C and D. It was also "heterogeneous" in a second
way: substance D contained different elements.

First, there were visibly
different materials in the NY Post powder. The powder consisted
of:

The fact that the NY Post powder was 88.5 percent soluble material
(mostly dried slime, a.k.a. dried "matrix material" which is left
behind when a mother germ dissolves after producing a spore), should
prove to anyone thinking logically that the spores were NOT weaponized
after they were fully formed. But, logic doesn't seem to be work
with conspiracy theorists, unless it's their own form of logic.

Below is a picture of NY Post spores embedded in the dried matrix
material:

Scientist John
Ezzell, in his talk at the
November 29,
2010, Anthrax Truther seminar, explained that the NY Post
powder looked like it had been centrifuged,
the water had been removed, the remaining pellet had been dried, and
the dried pellet had then been chopped up with a razor blade.
Since 88.5% of the powder was soluble matrix material, many chunks of
the NY
Post powder should have been nearly pure
matrix
material. That
suggests that the matrix material may have also been heterogeneous, i.e., the
slime almost certainly consisted of different elements.

Centrifugation separates
elements by their specific gravity. In
theory, centrifugation of the matrix material should have
concentrated any loose, left-over silicon from the bodies of the mother
germs into a disk near the bottom of the centrifuge tube. Thus,
there should have been a broken up disk of concentrated silicon
somewhere in the dried powder.

This is consistent with what was observed. The 10% reading was on
part of the disk. But, how can anyone
prove that is what happened? Much of the powder was evidently
destroyed in
various tests. And, if a lot of money
is spent on performing additional tests, will the results convince Rep.
Nadler and
the conspiracy theorists that the attack spores were NOT weaponized
with silicon? If
they cannot be convinced no matter what the evidence says, why bother?

The lesser problem - why did a high percentage of the attack spores
contain silicon in their spore coats? - seems to be related to the
conditions under which they were grown, probably at room temperatures
instead of at incubator temperatures. But, demonstrating that
would also take funding.

Personally, I'd like to see a project funded to provide the answers
just for historical purposes. Somewhere there should be money for
that. It would be valuable information, whether or not the
conspiracy theorists accept it.

May 24, 2011 -
As expected, the Rev. Harold Camping didn't admit to being totally and
ridiculously wrong about the world ending on May 21, he just gave
excuses and made up new theories and new dates.

"On May 21, this last
weekend, this is where the spiritual aspect of it really comes through.
God again brought judgment on the world. We didn’t see any difference
but God brought Judgment Day to bear upon the whole world. The whole
world is under Judgment Day and it will continue right up until Oct.
21, 2011 and by that time the whole world will be destroyed," he
proclaimed.

"Were not changing a date
at all; we're just learning that we have to be a little more spiritual
about this," he said in a rambling 90-minute radio broadcast that was
part sermon, part press conference. "But on Oct. 21, the world will be
destroyed. It won't be five months of destruction. It will come at
once."

But, he and his followers
aren' t going to be putting up billboards about this new revised
date. After all, Harold Camping was wrong about the world ending
in 1994, and he was wrong about the world ending on May 21, 2011.
Being wrong a thirdtime would be bad
for business. So, if Camping and his followers are really really quiet for the next five
months, and if the world doesn't end on October 21, maybe no one will
notice.

To view a video of Harold
Camping as he explained his beliefs, click HERE.

Meanwhile, on FreeRepublic.com,
I continue to argue with a person who truly believes that there was no anthrax letter sent to Florida.
"Southack" believes that Bob Stevens' death and the contamination in
the AMI
building had to do with the fact that a wife of one of the
editors at AMI had rented an apartment to some of the 9/11
hijackers. That is the only
fact of any importance to "Southack" in the AMI case. Everything
else is
just theory.The trail of anthrax through the post
offices from Trenton to Boca Raton is just a coincidence. The
fact that Stephanie Dailey remembers opening a letter containing a
powder is just a coincidence. The fact that she tested positive
for exposure to anthrax is just a coincidence. The fact that the
area around her desk was the most contaminated area in the building is
just a coincidence. Etc., etc. The only fact that is NOT a
coincidence, is the fact that the 9/11 hijackers rented an apartment
from the wife of an AMI editor. ("Southack"
believes the rent money was
contaminated with anthrax.)

And, meanwhile on Dr.
Meryl Nass's site, which she
moderates, my best arguments are not getting posted.

Ivins was prescribed
medicines to quell his murderous thoughts? You know this as a fact, and
have information supporting your conclusion?

I'd posted the names of Ivins' psychiatrists, including the
psychiatrist he went to for help in 1978 when he was thinking about murderingNancy Haigwood. And I posted the name of the
therapist to whom, in 2000, Ivins told his plans to murder Mara
Linscott by poisoning a bottle of wine he was going to give her.
The facts show that Ivins went to these mental health professionals
because he knew his murderous
plans were wrong, and he needed help to stop himself. But,
BugMaster's theory appears to be that he went to the psychiatrists
because he was depressed, and
it was the drugs that the
pyschiatrists prescribed for him that caused all the murderous
thoughts. And, evidently, none of his psychiatrists realized or
cared that they were giving him drugs that caused his murderous
impulses.

The same thing happened with my debate with "Old Atlantic Lighthouse"
(OAL). I pointed out all the facts that OAL didn't know about
how Ivins prepared the attack anthrax, and that OAL simply made up
numbers to get the results he wanted. And he responded that the
FBI didn't know those facts, either:

If the FBI doesn't know all
those things why are they saying they know Ivins did it? Don't you have
to prove a person could have done it to say you know they did it?
Didn't the FBI leave out that part in the case of Ivins?

I wrote a long comment explaining that it is not necessary to know exactly which road Ivins took while
driving to Princeton to mail the anthrax letters in order to show that
he had no abili and could have driven there. He
had the ability and the means. The same is true
with exactly how Ivins prepared the attack anthrax. Ivins was an
expert on creating anthrax spores. He knew many ways to create spores and many ways to dry spores. It
is not necessary to know exactlywhich method he used in order to
prove that he had the ability and means to do
it.

But, Dr. Nass didn't let my argument about that go through,
either. So, all that can be seen in OAL's argument -- and a
statement from Dr. Nass that she doesn't see any further point in
continuing the discussion.

It's frustrating. But, frustration is an accepted condition when
arguing with Anthrax Truthers.

May 23, 2011 -
According to USA
Today, the Rev. Harold Camping is "flabbergasted" that the world
didn't end on Saturday. Camping added:

"I'm looking for answers.
But now I have nothing else to say. I'll be back to work Monday and
will say more then."

Presumably, he'll be speaking on his radio show this evening.
Meanwhile, few (if any) of Camping's followers accept that his prophesy
was bogus.

But one man, his voice
quavering, said he was still holding out hope that they were one day
off. Another believer asserted that their prayers worked: God delayed
judgment so that more people could be saved, but the end is "imminent."

While this is going on, I'm trying to see if I can change the mind of a
True Believer on FreeRepublic.com who is totally certain that the
9/11 hijackers were behind the anthrax attacks. I don't expect to
be able to change his mind, but I feel the need to keep trying
different things to see if anything
works. And, I'm also arguing with a
conspiracy theorist on Dr. Nass's site for the same reason.
If I can't change the mind of an Anthrax Truther, maybe I can somehow demonstrate that there is no way to change the mind of an
Anthrax Truther. Maybe I can show the world all the tactics they
use to avoid accepting the facts.

May 22, 2011 - Groan!
The world was supposed to end
yesterday! So, of course, I didn't
prepare a comment for this morning. Now I've got to write one
from scratch. Grumble, grumble.

Evidently, 2 Peter 3:8 wasn't meant to be taken as mathematical
input.
It says:

With the Lord a day is like a
thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

Evidently, "like" wasn't meant to be interpreted as "computes to exactly."

Coincidentally, I
had a
discussion with "Old
Atlantic Lighthouse" last week where I pointed out that the
calculations he used in his attempts to prove Ivins to be innocent were
"garbage in, garbage out" -type calculations. "Lighthouse"
didn't have any input solid data to do his calculations (how many
plates Ivins used, how many were contaminated, how many spores he used
to seed them, etc.), so he just picked some numbers that would give him
the
results he wanted. In other words, the input he used was
"garbage,"
so the output he got was also "garbage."
When I pointed out the error "Lighthouse" had made, he stopped
arguing - for awhile. But, that didn't mean he accepted that his
calculations
were in error. He just started a different argument. The
same
with BugMaster.
Often they just go somewhere else and argue with
someone else. That's what a different conspiracy
theorist did last week. He looked around and found a reporter at McClatchy
newspapers gullible enough to believe him.

Harold
Camping, however, cannot start his argument over again somewhere
else. His erroneous calculation showed that the world would end yesterday.
It would be very
difficult to continue to argue that the world did indeed end yesterday.

Checking around to see what Harold Camping has to
say about his garbage
in, garbage out calculation, I haven't been able to find any comments
by Camping ... yet. Maybe he's busy rechecking his calculations.

“When everyone is gone and
God’s
not looking, we need to pick up some sweet stereo equipment and maybe
some new furniture for the mansion we’re going to squat in.”

More about Post Rapture Looting HERE.
It appears to be an example of how the best laid plans of mice and men (and
monkeys) ....

I tend to feel sorry for the
followers of Harold Camping. Some
spent their life savings on billboards advertising the coming Judgment
Day. It's one thing to make a stupid mistake, it's another to
make a stupid mistake with your life savings in front of
the entire world. Evidently, they are now all now busy
studying their Bibles, looking for explanations for what went
wrong. Or they are waiting for Camping to tell them what went
wrong.

The one thing they are NOT
doing is saying, "Ah! Of course! Harold Camping's
calculations were garbage in, garbage out-type calculations! That's why they didn't work!"
Instead, they are looking for ways to rationalize
what happened while still maintaining their faith.

And, so it is with the Anthrax Truthers. Proof won't change their
minds. They just look for ways to rationalize any facts which prove
them to be wrong, so that they can continue to believe what they want
to believe. E.g.: "That isn't proof, it's something made
up
by the government to convince people to believe their lies!"

While I might feel sorry for followers of Harold Camping, I do not feel sorry for TV and Newspaper
reporters who seemingly believe scientists who tell them nonsense, and
the reporters parrot the nonsense in newspapers and on TV. It may
be very similar to what the followers of Camping did with billboards,
but TV and newspaper reporters
aren't supposed to be "followers." They're supposed to be fact checkers.

In the past few days, I've seen just about every reporter on TV shaking
his or her head with disbelief over the actions of Harold Camping and
his followers. Some of the reports even ridicule Camping and his
followers.

Is it really that difficult to see that all True Believers think
basically alike? It shouldn't be.

In the past couple weeks, I've also seen reporters and others in the
media laughing over all the conspiracy theories about President Obama's
birth certificate and theories that Osama bin Laden wasn't really
dead. But, at the same
time, I'm seeing newspaper
reportersaccepting the
beliefs of a
conspiracy theorist who endlessly spouts nonsense about
the anthrax case.
Is it really that difficult to see that all conspiracy theorists think
basically alike? It shouldn't be.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 15, 2011, thru Saturday, May 21, 2011

May 21, 2011 -
Today, on Dr.
Meryl Nass's web site, "Anonymous" quoted Peter Weber of Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as suggesting that some additional
analysis would "pop the question marks really quickly" on all remaining
questions about the silicon that was found in the attack anthrax
powders - specifically the NY Post powder. And, "it'd be really
helpful for the closure of this case" if some unanswered questions were
answered.

But, there are questions that need to be answered before any other
question is going to be answered by additional analysis: First: Who is
going to provide the funding for
the addtional analysis?

I can provide some great suggestions on the types of testing that LLNL
could do, but who's going to pay for the work?

There are probably hundreds of scientists ready and willing to try to
answer the remaining "unanswered questions" about the silicon in the
attack powders. All they need is funding. Laboratories -
particularly federal laboratories - cannot just work on any project
they feel like working on. The project needs to be funded. Someone needs to pay for the work. And, before
that can happen, the work needs to be justified.

The second question that needs to be answered then is: Who is going to authorize spending money to debunk
the theories of a bunch of conspiracy theorists and True Believers,
a.k.a. Anthrax Truthers?

If the remaining "unanswered questions" are ever going to be answered,
the people who want the answers are going to have to find scientific
justification. They're going to have to explain the benefits of
the project. If would be nice if such a project would simply shut
up the Anthrax Truthers. But, that's never going to happen.
Conspiracy theorists and True Believers are never persuaded by facts. So,
some other justification is
needed.

I think it's going to require a scientist to find a scientific reason
to justify the costs of the research. And, that probably means
that the answers definitely
won't shut up the Anthrax Truthers. It will put things back
right where they are today: Scientists with beliefs disputing
scientists with facts.

the FBI lab reports released
in late February give no hint that bureau agents tried to find the
buyers of additives such as tin-catalyzed silicone polymers.

The apparent failure of the
FBI to pursue this avenue of investigation raises the ominous
possibility that the killer is still on the loose.

And the source of this
information (or ridiculous misinformation) is identified:

Several scientists and
former colleagues of Ivins argue that he was a career biologist who
probably lacked the chemistry knowledge and skills to concoct a
silicon-based additive.

"There's no way that an individual scientist can invent a new way of
making anthrax using silicon and tin," said Stuart Jacobsen, a Texas-based
analytical chemist for an electronics company who's closely studied the
FBI lab results. "It requires an institutional effort to do this, such
as at a military lab."

It appears that there is
no idea that is so absurd that some newspaper reporter somewhere can't
be convinced it is worthy of reporting to the public - particularly if
the story comes from a scientist with impressive credentials.

For me, the disputes between scientists
with beliefs and scientists with facts is a never-ending
fascination.May 17, 2011 -
I was arguing with "BugMaster"
earlier today. As part of the argument, she stated:

Occam's razor is attributed
to the 14th-century English logician, theologian and Franciscan friar
Father William of Ockham (d'Okham) although the principle was familiar
long before. The words attributed to Occam are "entities must not be
multiplied beyond necessity" (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter
necessitatem).

The FBI's so-called case against Ivins IS NOTHING BUT ENTITY
MULTIPLICATION!

And my argument was just the opposite: Her theory and the theories of
other "Anthrax Truthers" are nothing but "entity multiplication."

Occam's
razor (or Ockham's
razor) ... is a principle that generally recommends
selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest new
assumptions, when the hypotheses are equal in other respects.

"Entity multiplication" is just another way of saying "piling
assumption upon assumption."

Piling assumption upon assumption is what is done when Anthrax Truthers
argue that the 9/11 hijackers had something to do with the anthrax
attacks. The hijackers were all DEAD at time of the first
mailing. So, the Truthers assume
some convoluted way the mails could have been delayed for a few
days. The hijackers were all DEAD for three weeks at the time of
the second mailing, so the Truthers assume some associate did the
actual mailing, an associate who left no trace of his existence
behind. They assume
the 9/11 hijackers somehow obtained the Ames strain without leaving a
record. They assume
the 9/11 hijackers had some reason to try to avoid killing anyone with
the anthrax. They assume
the 9/11 hijackers had some reason to mail the letters in
Princeton. They just pile assumption upon assumption.

Therefore, according to Occam's razor, the case against Ivins is the
much better hypothesis.

Interestingly, this can also be illustrated with a news story someone
sent me today. I was sent a link to a
French web site where someone has developed an hypothesis about
this photograph:

The hypothesis is that the image was highly
manipulated to make it more dramatic propaganda. The article says
that someone
ran a program called "Tungstene" that is supposed to "detect the
different stages of alterations a photo may have
undergone" and highlight the major changes in red. Here is the
result:

The first assumption they made is, of course, that
the program does what they believe
it does.

The next assumption:

The light on and around
Hillary Clinton was enhanced, while other parts of the photo were
slightly darkened. This may be
because Clinton’s stricken expression is what confers the most
intensity to the photo.

The next assumption:

On
the laptop computer in front of Clinton lies a document, probably a
military map, which has been noticeably blurred. This tends to indicate its highly
confidential character, which the White House wanted to protect. What
the analysis of the photo reveals, however, is that the documents
around and under the blurred map, including what appears to be a
satellite photo, were in fact highlighted. In this case, the
alterations seem intended
to draw attention to the documents, rather than away from them.

The next assumption:

The left side of Obama’s
strained face was also highlighted, apparently to further stress the
tension of the scene.

The final assumption:

Finally, the numerous
medals on Brigadier General Marshall B. Webb’s uniform (seated, centre)
were brightened, possibly
to highlight his authority as a military commander.

And the post-final assumption:

Inexplicably, the bottom
part of the tie of the unidentified man standing behind Robert Gates
seems to have been added onto the photo altogether. One guess could be that the tie
was added to hide the man’s White House badge, which would have been
close enough to read, therefore revealing his identity.

So, their hypothesis is just one assumption piled upon another
assumption upon another, etc.

I contacted my alter ego, "FD," who has been analyzing photos for about
15 years. The first thing he did was locate a much larger
version of the Situation Room photo. Click HERE
to view it.

"FD's" hypothesis requires only one assumption: The program does NOT work as
claimed. All it does is highlight the most complex combinations
of pixels that are also sharp and clear.

1.
Hillary Clinton's jacket is highly
complex speckled pattern of brown and black. It shows as highly
complex, while the black border on her collar does not, nor does her
blouse, her face or her hands.2. The top photo
setting on the laptop computer in front of Clinton can be seen to be
deliberately blurred (modified), particularly in the large version of
the photo, yet it is darker than everything
around it. That is because blurring the photo obviously made the
combination of pixels far less complex. 3. The left side of
President Obama's face is speckled with highlights because it is a
complex combinations of browns and blacks just like Clinton's jacket.4. The medals on
Brigadier General Webb's uniform are a highly complex mixture of
colored ribbons.5. The bottom part
of the tie belonging to the unidentified man standing behind Robert
Gates is a
highly complex pattern of browns and blacks. Gate's tie is
blurred and less complex, so it isn't highlighted.

Also

6.
The computer keyboard under the
photos is in sharp focus and at an angle that makes all the keys a
complex pattern. The keyboard nearer to the photographer is
blurred and less complex.7. The pages of the
books under Clinton's hand are complex because they are stacks of thin
pages.8. The sticker on
the
back of the computer in front of President Obama contains complex
writing.9. The photos under
the blurred photo on the laptop are complex because they are photos
viewed in
miniature.10. The jumble of
wires between the computers between Clinton and Vice President Biden
are a complex jumble of wires.

So, "FD's" hypothesis requires only one assumption: the program
detects pixel complexity, not
signs of modification. The French web site's hypothesis
requires many more assumptions and doesn't explain items 6 through 10
above.

Thus, according to Occam's razor, "FD's"
hypothesis is much more likely to be correct.

as Kay sees it, conspiracy
thinking is now experiencing a dangerous uptick in popularity. The
terrorist threat has replaced the Red menace

And

Some of Kay’s most
illuminating passages center not on what conspiracy theorists believe —
even to dignify it with the word “theory” is probably to grant them
more legitimacy than they deserve — but on why they are attracted to such tedious
rubbish in the first place. He
divides them into different camps, including the “cranks” and the
“firebrands.”

Unfortunately, the
reviewer doesn't explain the difference between a "crank" and a
"firebrand." He describes a "crank" as a highly
educated person in "a mid-life crisis" for whom a belief in a
conspiracy theory offers a new "sense of mission." But, there is
nothing in the review about what constitutes a "firebrand."

The author, Jonathan Kay's concern is seemingly that this current
phenomenon is too similar to past types of mass hysteria and
anti-intellectualism which led to rise of dictators.

The reviewer, however, sees this new phenomenon as far less
focused. So do I. There are dozens of conspiracy theories,
and the believers in one theory tend to ridicule the believers in
others. And, even the believers in a specific theory tend to
disagree with other believers in the same theory as to what the facts
are and what the facts mean.

Plus, hopefully, it's now far easier than in the past to show the
inconsistencies of arguments. As with Mitt Romney, it's very easy
to show that he once argued in favor of something that he is now
supposed to be against. And, if a leader starts to emerge among
the Truthers, it's easy to show that leader's ignorance of facts and
acceptance of things shown to be total nonsense. These days it's
all on TV for the entire world to see, and it's on the Internet to be
played over and over.
I worry sometimes about the influence of True Believers and conspiracy
theorists on the Internet. But, then you watch them argue their
beliefs on TV, it's usually totally different. On the Internet,
they're usually able to avoid being put in a position where their views
can be challenged with facts. It's like they have their own
little TV station where they can say what they want. On a true TV
network, however, unless they control the entire network, they cannot
prevent people with facts from showing how the Truther beliefs make no
sense. It's very difficult to get a following when what you say
can be seen by the world to be totally hilarious when shown side by
side with solid facts. May 15, 2011 - Last Sunday, I stated that I
would try to avoid
writing anything more about the upcoming Judgment Day until Sunday, May 22. And, I've
been asked to avoid writing anything further about a
certain book until after it
goes formally on sale to the public on June 7. That
somewhat
limits what I can write about today.

One thing I can comment upon
is a video of
Lawrence O'Donnell arguing with Attorney Orly Taitz.
The person who brought the video to my attention saw it as an example
of how
"the establishment" and O'Donnell wouldn't allow Taitz to show evidence
of her conspiracy
theories to the American public. I see it differently, of
course.

For me, it's just as O'Donnell says. He invited Taitz on his
show to discuss President Obama's birth certificate, which Taitz had
been demanding to see for two years because she didn't believe it
existed. And, since it was now available for all to see,
O'Donnell
wanted to see what Taitz had to say about it. She had agreed to
discuss the birth certificate on the show. That was the only reason she was asked to
appear on the show.

Instead, she did as all conspiracy theorists do when confronted with
facts showing their conspiracies to be nonsense: She refused to discuss it and changed the subject.
She
wouldn't talk about the birth certificate. She would only talk
about a different part of her theory:
peculiarities with Obama's Social Security number and his draft
card. O'Donnell won't let her do that, and the interview ends
with
them talking over one another until O'Donnell shuts her off.

I see it as a very good example of the difficulties of trying to
discuss facts with conspiracy
theorists and True Believers. They
won't get into a discussion of facts with you, except on their terms.
If
they have control of the shut-off button, they'll shut you off (as Lew
Weinstein did with me). If you have control, they'll change the
subject and preach whatever they want to preach until you press the
shut-off button (as O'Donnell did with Taitz).

And then all the other conspiracy theorists and True Believers will nod
their heads and agree that it's proof of their beliefs: everyone is
involved in a vast conspiracy to prevent them from showing evidence of
their theories and
beliefs. At the end of the segment, O'Donnell laments that he
should have known better. Yes, he should have. But, the
clip is a good example of such an argument, anyway.

To recap: had the anthrax
been grown in Ivins' lab, B. subtilis would have been present in the
lab and the FBI would have found it. Believe me, they tried. They knew
this could unravel their entire case.

To send Ed Lake in now to
spin
fantasies in an attempt at damage control is ludicrous. Is Ed Lake
FBI's best shot? I guess the FBI case is even weaker than I thought.

The discussion was about the Bacillus
subtilis contamination in the media letters and how it may have
gotten there. To the Anthrax truthers, the B subtilis it must have
gotten into the letters through some
means that would prove Ivins to have been innocent. And that must be why
the FBI didn't see the contamination as worthwhile to investigate
further.

The facts say that B subtilis
spores were probably in a particle of dust that landed on a plate as it
was being inoculated to grow something else - like anthrax.
That's how it typically
happens. B
subtilis is a relatively harmless bacteria that is all around us
almost all the time, particularly in dirt and dust. And it
occasionally contaminates experiments.

The Anthrax
Truthers continue to argue that since investigators didn't find
matching B subtilis spores in
Ivins' lab, the contamination couldn't
have come from there. The reality is, of course, quite
different.

(1) In
April of 2002, USAMRIID personnel thoroughly cleaned
Ivins' lab
and many other areas in Building 1425 after Ivins told
people that he'd done two
unauthorized cleanings after becoming worried
about contamination from the examination of the Daschle and from a
spill that took place in a lab. (2) The B subtilis wasn't
noticed in the media letters until mid-2005. So, in
addition to
the cleaning by Ivins in December of 2001, his second cleaning in April
of 2002, and the massive and comprehensive third cleaning that also took place
in April of 2002, there were undoubtedly additional cleanings during the
followingthree years before
the B subtilis contamination
was found in
the media letters and before investigators realized it might possibly
provide evidence of some
kind.

So, no one except rabid conspiracy theorists would expect to still
find the matching B subtilis
in a lab that had been so thoroughly cleaned so many times.
It wouldn't be more than a very remote possibility to anyone else.

The question of how B subtilis
spores might have gotten into the lab is the same question as: How does
dust get into a
lab? Answer: It gets tracked in
by people entering from the outside.

The key fact about BSL-3 labs that needs to be understood is that they
are designed to keep germs from getting out of the
lab. They are not designed
to keep germs from getting into
the lab -- as is the case in hospitals. You do not scrub down
before going into a BSL-3 lab, as you do before going into an operating
room, you scrub down after leaving
the BSL-3 lab.

Furthermore, BSL-3 labs are under negative air pressure. That
means that, when you open the door to the lab, air from the outside is sucked into the
lab. And the biosafety cabinets used during the
innoculation of plates have negative air pressure, which means air from outside the cabinet is sucked
into the cabinet.

Meanwhile, in the hallway outside the lab, people are walking around in
their street shoes and (theoretically) tracking dirt, dust and bacteria
from the outside all
over the place.

Of course, care is taken to try to avoid getting any foreign bacteria
onto plates while they are being inoculated. They remove the
cover, inoculate the media and then close the cover. But, since B subtilis is almost everywhere,
it's difficult to prevent it from occasionally contaminating a plate or
flask or vial or test tube.

It's also unknown
if plates were
inoculated in a BSL-3 lab or a BSL-2 lab, but the facts suggest it was
done in a BSL-2 lab. The image below is of Bruce Ivins
handling a stack of plates. It shows him handling the plates with
his bare hands in
an open lab environment, almost certainly a BSL-2 lab, since he isn't
wearing a mask.

He appears to be wearing a
lab smock and safety glasses as his only
protection. That's a
biosafety cabinet behind him.
You can see the chair on which he'd sit. In the picture, the open
part of the cabinet
is the space between his nose and his shoulder. The plexiglass
protection is above that open part. A bacteriologist like Ivins
would
place the fresh, media- covered plates in the cabinet along with the
inoculation
materials, he'd then sit at the cabinet and, looking through the
plexiglass, he'd reach through the open part
to innoculate the plates. Fans in the top of the cabinet suck air
into the
cabinet through the open part to make certain that none of the
materials used in the inoculation process would escape into the
lab.
The air gets filtered before it is released again back into the
lab.

Typically, he'd use gloves while inoculating the plates, and he'd
dispose of or sterilize the gloves when done. He might also use
sleeve
protectors
to prevent carrying any bacteria that is inside the cabinet to the
outside. The concern is not
about bacteria that might be on the
sleeve
protectors, on his smock, on the floor or in the air getting into the cabinet.
Some of that was on my mind early in the week after I decided to
page through some of the 9,600
pages of documents the FBI submitted to the National Academy of
Sciences to find where I'd left off in my readings. As I was
doing that, I
noticed a page where it was stated that Dr. Patricia
Worsham's lab was located in Biology Suite 3 in Building 1425, the same
suite which contained Bruce Ivins' labs. Page 97 of Batch 1
Module 2 (B1M2) says:

Security.
Repository
[derived] samples were stored inside a key-lock
freezer within the keypad-controlled room B309. Only the PI
[Primary Investigator], SFC [REDACTED] and Special Agent [REDACTED] had
unescorted access rights to B309. Sample remnants were
destroyed the day of use if possible. All waste materials
from the experiment (plates, pipette trays etc.) were autoclaved
immediately upon exiting B309 or were maintained in a secure fashion
within the locked room.

So, when Dr. Worsham was looking
for the "morphs" and
for B subtilis contamination
by analyzing various anthrax
samples derived or extracted from
the samples in the FBI Repository, the derived samples all were stored
inside a key-lock freezer within
the
keypad-controlled room B309. And, laboratory B309 is
evidently another BioSafety Level 3
lab in Suite 3.

That pointed out something I hadn't been thinking about when I first
read that page: Room B309 is at the
opposite end of the corridor from the locker rooms and showers.

That appears to means that
anyone leaving Worsham's lab or any other BSL-3 lab in Suite 3 would
have to walk down the common corridor to get to the
showers. It appears
to mean that the keypad to get into Ivins' BSL-3
lab in room B303 was in the corridor, not
in room B302. And that appears
to mean, when Ivins left room B303, he'd
have to go into the corridor (just as Dr. Worsham would have to do) in
order to get to the showers and the locker room.

I'd been trying to figure out for weeks
how - since there didn't appear to be any door
between rooms B302 and B303 - Ivins could get into and out of his BSL-3
lab (room #B303) without going into the central corridor. The
answer appears to
be: He couldn't.

There is no wall or device
that prevents someone from going from a BSL-3 lab to the outside
without taking a shower, there is only a rule that
you cannot go from a BSL-3 lab to the outside without taking a shower.

I'm not suggesting that there is anything wrong with that. It's
just something I learned last week, something I'd thought was
different. When I first started studying the details of this
case, I thought anthrax would be handled inside a BSL-4 lab, and everyone would
be wearing space-suit type protection. Gradually, I learned
that they didn't even use glove-boxes, they handled anthrax
inside biosafety cabinets with open
fronts. They primarily rely on their anthrax vaccine
inoculations to protect them. It's not like in the
movies. Real life is less dramatic - but maybe more scary.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 8, 2011, thru Saturday, May 14, 2011

May
11-12, 2011
-
Hmm. It appears to be standard practice for book reviewers (or
people who are sent preliminary copies of books to review) to sell the books they receive to
specific second-hand book dealers - after
reading them, presumably. David Willman's new book "The
Mirage Man" has gone that route, and I'm currently in the process
of reading it. It says that reviews should not be published until
after the book is released (in June according to Amazon, in July
according to the reviewers' copy of the book), but there are already
reviews on Willman's own site HERE
and another site HERE.
So, I suppose it would be okay to mention a few things about the book
(and it might help sell copies):

1. The book confirms that Ivins planned to poison his former
associate Mara Linscott in June or July of 2000. Ivins told his
therapist that the "young woman" was a former associate whose name was
"Mara." But he didn't reveal her last name to the
therapist. So, my deduction that the "young woman" mentioned in the
Washington Post article was Linscott has been validated. The
book identifies the therapist by name. (It's not Jean
Duley. Jean Duley doesn't come into the picture until 2008.)

2. The book reveals that Ivins was thinking about poisoning a different woman in 1979. He
told his psychiatrist about
those thoughts. That's something I need to add to my page
about Evidence vs Beliefs after
Willman's book is published. Ivins evidently changed his mind
about that plan, too. The book also identifies the psychiatrist
by name.

3. The book indicates that Diane Ivins started running a day-care
center out
of her home almost as soon as they moved to the house across the street
from Ft. Detrick in the early 1980s, even before they adopted Amanda and Andy
in 1984. Diane was formerly a
registered nurse, and she ran theday-care
center
for about
two decades. It was a way of bringing in additional income
for her family. While David Willman doesn't say anything about licenses, I've been
arguing with Anthrax Truthers for years on that
subject. They constantly pointed out that Diane
Ivins
didn't actually apply for a day-care business
license until January of 2003, therefore, by their reasoning, there
wouldn't have been any first graders in her home in September
and October of 2001. And I've been arguing that, if she didn't
actually have a license, running an unlicensed
day care center (or baby
sitting service) is a very common
way for day-care center operators to
get started. The fact that Diane Ivins was apparently running a
day-care center (licensed or unlicensed) at the time of the anthrax
mailings certainly fits
with my analysis, although I wish
Willman would have provided more details.

4. In my April 24 comment, I wondered if Ivins walked to work or
drove, since he lived only a half mile away. Willman's book says
he bicycled to
work. Of course. I should have figured that.

The first chapters of the book include a lot of detail about Ivins'
early years in high school and college, all obtained via interviews
Willman had with people who knew him back then. It's an enjoyable
book filled it fascinating details, including the names of people who
received and sent various emails, information that was always redacted
in previously released documents.

The people who still think Ivins was innocent are going to find it
contains a lot of new information they're going to have to distort,
rationalize
or ignore. The people who think Ivins was guilty will find it
fills in a lot of missing details.

May 8, 2011 - Last week was a very unusual and a very
busy week. For me, it began when I tried to get a discussion
going about evidence, particularly
"exculpatory
evidence" (i.e., evidence indicating innocence), on Dr.
Meryl Nass's web site. I created a
hypothetical case for discussion. Here's a modified version:

A hypothetical case:

First, the evidence of guilt:

Evidence exhibit #1 points to suspects A, B, C and D.

Evidence exhibit #2 points to suspects A, C and G.

Evidence exhibit #3 points to suspects C, E and F.

Evidence exhibit #4 points to suspects A, C and F.

Evidence exhibit #5 points to suspects C and G.

Conclusion: ALL the evidence of
guilt points to Suspect C as the culprit.

Next, we look at the exculpatory evidence:

Evidence shows it is virtually impossible for anyone but A, B, C, D, E,
F
and G to
have accessed the scene of the crime ("exculpatory evidence" for
everyone else).

A, B and E have solid alibis ("exculpatory evidence") for the time of
the crime.

D is physically challenged and totally incapable of doing what was
necessary
to commit the crime ("exculpatory evidence").

F and G are unskilled and have no knowledge of the required techniques
used in the crime ("exculpatory evidence").

Final conclusion: Beyond any
reasonable doubt, Suspect C is the person who committed the crime.

I had hoped that someone
would
argue that there is no
"evidence of guilt" in this case, because they saw no single item of evidence that
pointed specifically to
Suspect
C and only to Suspect
C. That seems to be the standard thinking among the Anthrax
Truthers:
if an item of evidence also points to someone else, then they see it as
worthless and not really evidence (or they might even see it as
"exculpatory
evidence").

In reality, evidence of guilt that points to multiple people is still
evidence of guilt in any court.

The best example of evidence pointing to multiple "possible
suspects" in the anthrax case is the evidence showing that the
envelopes used in the attacks were purchased at a post office in either
Maryland or Virginia. By itself, that evidence points to millions of people as "possible
suspects." Yet, it could
also be "exculpatory evidence" showing that millions of other people in Utah
and Ohio and 46 other States could not
have committed the crime.

By itself, the evidence of where the envelopes were purchased means
very little. But, it is not the
only evidence in the case. When combined with all the other
evidence, it helps to narrow down the list of suspects to just one:
Bruce Ivins.

If someone's Aunt Bertha bought some envelopes while on vacation in
Maryland in 2001 and took them home to Texas, that is not evidence
of any kind,
since, by itself, it doesn't help prove anyone's guilt or innocence.

I planned to relate this to the Bacillus
subtilis contamination found in the media letters. It's
currently not evidence of any kind, since it neither tends to prove
anyone's guilt or innocence. Moreover, if it could be turned into
evidence, it appears that the B
subtilis
could only be
used to help prove Ivins' guilt.
If it was found somewhere at Ft. Detrick, it would point to hundreds of "possible
suspects" working at USAMRIID, including
Bruce Ivins. In court, that would be more evidence against Ivins.

What kind of "exculpatory evidence" could it be? Not finding it at USAMRIID means
absolutely nothing.
That's the current situation. The B
subtilis
wasn't identified in the media powders until 2005. By that time,
four years after the crime,
countless house-cleanings had
been done at USAMRIID. The source of the contamination could have
been sterilized years earlier. You could never use the absence of B subtilis with matching DNA
as "exculpatory evidence" for anyone. The absense of evidence is
not evidence.
And, even
if B subtilis
bacteria with matching DNA were found in Ohio or Utah, would that prove
Ivins' innocence? No. Not by itself. Materials and
letters were
exchanged between USAMRIID and Battelle and Dugway all the time.
The
contamination could have come that way. It would have no more
value as exculpatory evidence than the claim by his boss that Ivins
just
wasn't the type of person to have committed such a crime. On the
scales of Justice, it would have very little weight to offset the
massive
amount of evidence of Ivins' guilt.

I also kept hoping a discussion of the hypothetical case would generate
an argument that would allow me to argue some solid evidence that
points
to Bruce Ivins
and to no one
else: specifically the evidence that Ivins put a hidden
coded message in the media
letters and was observed throwing away the code books. I know the
Anthrax Truthers will argue that many other people also owned the
same book and magazine. True, but how many of them had the
capability to commit the crime? And how many of those threw away
the coding materials after the FBI searched their homes?

That would undoubtedly result in an argument that "it still proves
nothing." In reality, however, it proves a great deal. It
proves that
Anthrax Truthers won't accept anything
as evidence unless it is evidence that supports their beliefs.
Then, everything is evidence,
even if they cannot explain how it could possibly be evidence.

But, no one
responded to my hypothetical case. So, instead of starting a new
discussion about the evidence against Bruce Ivins, the week began with discussions about
"birthers" and
how hilarious it was to watch Donald Trump trying to avoid looking at
President Obama's long
form birth certificate.

Then the news broke about the killing of
Osama bin Laden, and conspiracy theorists and True Believers
immediately began questioning
everything. The facts kept piling up until most conspiracy
theorists went quiet and only the voices of the True Believers could
still be heard, arguing that they still didn't beieve that bin Laden
had been killed.

Then, a couple people who knew I was interested in
the thought processes of True
Believers sent me emails about the True Believers who believe the end of the world is coming in just
two weeks.

Next, some guy sent me an email asking
for assistance in tracking down his missing next door neighbor, who he
thinks sent the Goldman Sachs letters (remember them?).

And then
another guy started bitching to me about how it was an insult to all
peace-loving Americans that we didn't publicly defile bin Laden's body.

Meanwhile, each day, I'd check on Dr. Nass's web site and other sites
where discussions
of the
anthrax attacks of 2001 typically took place. But, things
were unusually quiet, just one lone True Believer on his soap box
preaching to a mostly empty street corner.

While waiting for things to settle down, so I could start discussing
the anthrax case again, it was also a time to observe
those other events and wax philosophical.

It was interesting to see one reporter after another state that
providing evidence to conspiracy theorists was a waste of time, since
they'd just argue that the evidence was manufactured to support and
cover up the vast conspiracy.

What do the anthrax conspiracy theorists think about the "birther" and
"deather" conspiracy theorists? None offered any opinions.
Past experience has shown that they probably think the other theorists
are
crazy. (In spite of all the obvious similarities, they
really hate
being compared to hoax moon landing conspiracy theorists, alien
visitors conspiracy theorists, Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorists and
the various assassination conspiracy theorists. And vice
versa.)

And, I began to wonder: How did the May 21 Judgment Day
True Believers become so accepting of the opinions and calculations of
a 89 year old preacher on the radio? It turns out that 41%
of Americans believe that Judgment Day will occur before 2050.
So, there were plenty of people just waiting for someone to tell them
what they want to believe -- or to confirm what they fear the
most. If you want to double-check Harold Camping's calculations,
click HERE.
However, some news articles indicate that the calculations were
actually done by Family Radio's special projects coordinator Michael
Garcia, not Camping. Another article says the calculations
were the work of Keith
Harwood, the owner of a radio station. If you wonder if Camping's
followers will get their donations back if the world doesn't end on May
21, click HERE. If you wonder how big this
cult or movement is, according to The
Press of Atlantic City:

About 1,200 billboards have
been
erected across the United
States, and more than 2,000 have appeared overseas in Iraq,
Lebanon, Jordan, Dubai, Russia, Egypt, Ireland, Australia, France
and Italy [plus a lot more countries].

Interestingly,
unlike the
anthrax True Believers, the Judgment Day True Believers do not seem to
mind being called "True Believers." They take pride in having
absolutely no doubt about what they believe. And, they don't consider non-believers who
disagree
with them to be "True Believers" just because the non-believers truly believe what the facts say
instead of what some preacher says.
The Judgment Day True Believers are an interesting topic for discussion
and a fascinating diversion, but it's
primarily an example of preachers
and followers. Anthrax True
Believers seem to be just preachers and more preachers, with very few
real followers (only some bemused observers).

I'm going to try
to avoid mentioning the Judgment Day True Believers again until my
comment of May 22 (assuming there is a May 22). However,
right now,
I feel a need to cite two passages from the Bible:
For the preachers, there is Matthew
15:14:

Let them alone: they be
blind
leaders of the blind. And
if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the
ditch.

For if
they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is
alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.

In other words, followers shouldn't expect
to get their
donations back if the world doesn't end on May 21. The preacher
is probably just going to do as the song says:
He's going to pick himself up, dust himself off, and start all over
again.

Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 1, 2011, thru Saturday, May 7, 2011

May 6, 2011 - News
agencies are reporting that al Qaeda has released a statement
confirming that Osama bin Laden is dead. That conjures up an
image of a bunch of conspiracy theorists standing around discussing the
matter. One says, "Okay, I don't believe President Obama or the
Navy Seals, but if
al Qaeda says it's true, then it must be true." And another says,
"No, al Qaeda is agreeing with President Obama and the Navy Seals, so
that must mean that they're all somehow working together to mislead
us." And a third says, "I think we should ask Harold Camping to
see what he says we should believe. But, .... we'd better
ask him soon."

May 5, 2011 (B)
- According to Wikipedia,
the conspiracy theorists who think Osama bin Laden is still alive are
being referred
to as "deathers" and "proofers." An article titled "The
Dumbest Deather Theory" has a reader's comment with a suggestion
that maybe the Long Form Death
Certificate should be produced to convince the "deathers."

On the other hand, the
Associated Press has filed a Freedom Of Information Act request for
the photos of bin Laden with a large bullet hole in his head, plus they
also want to see the videos of the raid. That might actually work.

May 5, 2011 (A)
-
Hmm. There's a billboard next to the Brooklyn-Queens
Expressway advising people that, according to radio
preacher Harold
Camping, Judgment Day is coming on Saturday, May 21, just over two
weeks from now.

However, an article in The
Gothamist about the billboard says that May 21 is only the start of the "judgment
period." The actual obliteration of Planet Earth won't take place
until October 21, five months later. So, if you wake up on May 22
to a nice, beautiful, quiet Sunday morning, it just means no actual
destruction has yet taken place
... except to the businesses and lives of followers
of Harold Camping who spend all their money paying for such
billboards and signs, as a New Jersey follower of Harold Camping did to
pay for
billboards like this one:

Note that 2012 is crossed out on the billboard, an indicator that the
True Believers who believe as the Mayans did, that the end of the world
will take place in 2012, are wrong. Unless the world doesn't end
on October 21, 2011, then maybe ....

Click HERE,
HERE,
HERE
and HERE
for more pictures of billboards and articles about them. The web
site HERE
shows the billboards are up all
around the world. Considering the cost of living and the
price of land, would the most
expensive billboards be in London,
Brazil,
New
York City, Iraq
or Dubai?
The one HERE
is in Vanuatu. I
had to look it up. It's an island nation in the South
Pacific, near Australia. Click HERE
for an article about a guy in Texas who has been paying $1,000 a month
for such billboards since October.

May 4, 2011 -
On "The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart" last night, Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart had a good laugh
over the way some "Birthers" are arguing that the killing of Osama bin
Laden was clearly just a stunt
or a diversion to draw the
American people's attention away from the more important issue: Obama's
faked birth certificate.

The arguments are a standard reaction from conspiracy theorists.
If they
can't twist or distort something to fit their theories, they see it as
part of the vast government conspiracy to get people to ignore their
theories.

Richard Schuler, who is
representing Stevens and her children, said that it is important to federal prosecutors
that Ivins is blamed for the attacks because the federal government is
not responsible for intentional acts and would therefore be able
to escape liability.

In other words, if a soldier uses his military issue pistol to shoot
his girlfriend in fit of jealousy, the Army is not to blame for
allowing the soldier to have access to the pistol. There was no
way for the Army to have known or to predict that the soldier would use
the weapon for his own personal purposes.

It's a good legal argument. Using the beliefs of Ivins' supervisors who claim Ivins couldn't be the anthrax
killer seems to be a desperate attempt to offset the preponderance of evidence that
Ivins was definitely the anthrax killer, and that he misappropriated
government materials for his own deliberate and personal purposes.

May 3, 2011 (A)
- After 24 hours of watching news reports about bin Laden's death on
TV, and after reading numerous printed reports, I'm beginning to feel
much less concerned that something could go wrong and there could have
been a mistake of some kind. The DNA match, the statement by one
of bin Laden's wives who was present in the compound, and the
wealth of
valuable intelligence data they collected during the raid wiped away
all rational concerns. Plus, the fact that they hauled the body
away in a helicopter and buried it at sea many hours later means they
had ample
opportunity to photograph and examine the body to be absolutely
certain.

The original plan for the
raid was to bomb the house, but President Obama ultimately decided
against that. “The helicopter raid was riskier. It was more daring,” an
official said. “But he wanted
proof. He didn’t want to just leave a pile of rubble.” Officials
also knew there were 22 people living there, and Obama wanted to be
sure not to kill all the civilians. So he ordered officials to come up
with an air-assault plan. The forces held rehearsals of the raid on
April 7 and April 13, with officials monitoring the action from
Washington.

The
more facts I see, the
better I like it. After nearly 10 years of nonsensical or
misleading news reports about the anthrax investigation, I've become very skeptical of first news
accounts. And I keep looking for things that conspiracy
theorists and True Believers can use to create arguments. I
don't expect bin Laden to appear on TV tomorrow saying the reports of
his
death were greatly exaggerated. I think he is almost certainly
dead. But, I keep looking for a news report titled: "Bin Laden is
dead
and here is all the proof to make it an absolute certainty." May 1, 2011 (B)
- I've updated my version of the
Docket for the Stevens vs USA lawsuit. I've also
uploaded the court document which
generated the Palm
Beach Post article I commented upon yesterday.

The 10 page
.pdf file court document starts by stating that Maureen Stevens (and
her lawyers) no
longer agree to "Stipulation #6," in which they had previously agreed
with the US government that Bruce Ivins was the anthrax mailer.
The pdf file then goes into a lot of interesting details about the
depositions in which Dr. William Byrne and Dr. Gerald Andrews of
USAMRIID stated their beliefs
that the person who worked for them,
Bruce Edwards Ivins, could not
have been the anthrax mailer.

Dr. Byrne was Ivins' supervisor from August 1998 to January 2000, and
Dr. Andrews was Ivins' supervisor from January 2000 until 2003.
They were USAMRIID's "Chief of Bacteriology" during those times.

Interestingly (and amusingly), Dr. Byrne testified that a lot of
"foreign nationals" ("people from Egypt, Poland, India, Iran, Latvia
and China") were employed at USAMRIID from time to time as either
contractors or as National Science Council fellows. The
suggestion appears to be that one of those presumably untrustworthy
foreigners must have stolen some of the contents from flask RMR-1029 to
make the attack anthrax. Dr. Byrne testified, "I don't believe
that Bruce Ivins was the perpetrator," because a sociopath and murderer
just "wasn't the person I knew." Plus, because the exact
equipment Ivins presumably used hasn't been specifically identified by
the FBI, Dr. Byrne doesn't believe Ivins had the equipment or the
skills needed to make the dry anthrax powders in the letters.
Besides, people would have noticed what Ivins was doing, and there
would have been evidence left behind.

Dr. Andrews, who was Ivins' supervisor at the time Ivins prepared the
anthrax letters and murdered 5 people, had similar beliefs, i.e., Ivins
didn't have the equipment or the skills required to make "weaponized"
anthrax spores, people would have noticed, and there would have been
evidence left behind. Plus, "what he saw as the evidence
(in the envelopes) was probably in the range of six months to a year's
worth of work pretty much dedicating three-quarters to full-time during
the work week." He added, "Bruce Ivins never made dry
spores." Item #21 on page 6 of the pdf file says:

Interestingly,
Dr. Andrews indicated that
he held his opinion with a degree of 95% confidence that the final weaponized product could not have been produced at USAMRIID.

So, Dr. Andrews not only believes that Bruce Ivins couldn't have made
the "weaponized" powders, but neither
could anyone else at USAMRIID.

Yet, during the course of the investigation, Ivins himself pointed at
numerous other scientists at USAMRIID as people who could have made the powders.
And Dr. John Ezzell reportedly stated at the November 29, 2010,
conference that he could do it, and if he could do it, Ivins could also
do it.

That's the type of dispute between experts that I'd love to see played out in a court
room. Experts with beliefs (like Byrne and Andrews) would state
their beliefs, and experts with facts (like Ezzell) would show how
their beliefs are false. It's a classic confrontation seen so
often in history: Expert #1 says it can't be done, and expert #2
proceeds to do it.

The difference in this case, unfortunately, is the experts with beliefs
will continue to hold onto their beliefs even after they see that their
beliefs are incorrect. They'll just change the argument to:
"Well, you might be able to do it very easily, but that doesn't mean
that Bruce
Ivins was able to do it. I still believe that Bruce Ivins
couldn't have done it.

"And Bruce Ivins is dead, so you can never prove anything for
certain. Nyah nyah nyah."

One of the striking things
about
the reaction to the president's calm and — to reasonable minds —
entirely persuasive appearance in the White
House briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with
which so many leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented.

If you watched various TV
news
reporters trying to get Donald Trump to look at the "long form" of
President Obama's birth certificate, however, you would have seen that
he didn't
"reject" it. Trump refused to
look at it.Why?
Because doing so could have put Trump on the defensive. Birthers and Truthers attack, they do not defend.
They have no way to defend their beliefs, because their beliefs are beliefs, not facts. They have
no facts. So, they must
attack. By refusing to look at the birth certificate, Trump
avoided being put on the defensive, and, instead, he simply moved on
other
attacks - questioning how Obama managed to get into Harvard when his
earlier school records showed he was "a bad student." Then Trump
praised himself for forcing the President to produce the long-form of
his birth certificate, while at the same time attacking the President
for taking so long to do so.

The online magazine Slate
quoted
Sharon Guthrie, legislative director for a Texas state legislator who has
introduced birther legislation, as saying, "What I've seen online, what they
produced today, still says `certificate of live birth' across the top.
We want to see a 'birth certificate.'"

Others insist that the
certificate is forged. They claim that by using
photo-editing software to examine the PDF file the White House
released, it becomes clear that the document consists of several
separate layers, indicating that it has somehow been manipulated.

Other quibbles get even more detailed: Why is the "Date Accepted" on
the certificate four days later than the "Birth Date"? Obama's father's
race is listed as "African," but many argue that in 1961 the more
likely term would have been "negro." The word "Caucasian" under the
listing for Obama's mother's race looks too perfect to have been done
with a typewriter from that time.

Speaking of typewriters, others ask, why are the entries on the form
centered instead of left-justified? And, because every good conspiracy
needs a mysterious death, isn't
it oddly convenient that the doctor who signed the birth certificate
died eight years ago and thus cannot answer any questions?

The article also says: "Good
conspiracy theories don't die — they simply adapt."
I've been seeing this same phenomenon for nearly ten years in the
anthrax
case. The silicon issue is the prime example. As each bogus
theory about the silicon being proof of a sophisticated
"weaponization" process was shot down by solid facts and solid science,
the conspiracy theorists just manufactured a new bogus theory and
started new arguments about
how the silicon
is proof of sophisticated weaponization.

Yesterday's Los Angeles Times' editorial showed how this ability to
adapt to
the facts so you can continue to believe what you want to believe isn't
really a new phenomenon:

In the 1830s, an Upstate New York
farmer turned biblical exegete named William Miller used a personal mathematical formula
to predict that the second coming would occur in 1843. By all
accounts, Miller wasn't much of a speaker himself, but one of his
Boston followers had one of the new high-speed printing presses that
were creating America's first truly popular media. Soon, Miller's
followers are thought to have numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

What's significant is
that,
when 1843 came and went without an apocalypse, they simply recalculated
and reformulated and kept on believing — setting a standard for a
certain kind of cultic American group-think that has recurred in our
national life ever since.

If you've been watching
the news
during the past few weeks, you've seen this is happening again - almost
identically. California-based evangelical radio preacher Harold
Camping is predicting that the
end of the world is coming this month.
His mathematical calculations make it a certainty - for him and his
followers. The
Huffington Post reports:

Judgment
Day is coming May 21, 2011 -- not sometime this decade, not
sometime this year, but precisely on May 21.

The hundreds of billboards warning unrepentant commuters of their
impending doom are courtesy of a California radio station led by
89-year-old Harold Camping, who
initially predicted the world would end in 1994.

So, Camping previously predicted the end of the world would happen in
1994. But, it didn't happen. So, he recalculated and now
the new date is May 21, 2011. But, if it doesn't happen on that
date, he'll almost certainly find another error in his calculations
that will allow him and his followers to adapt to a new date.

It's the thinking of a True Believer. These True Believers differ
from
conspiracy theorists only because these True Believers don't think the
government is behind the failure of their own calculations to determine
the correct date.

Given that the President
released
his birth certificate, it clearly does exist. At a minimum, this
existence seems to call into question the credibility of Mr. Trump’s
sources, if not their actual existence.

Remember, these were the
investigators Trump allegedly had on the ground in Hawaii who “could
not believe what they’re finding.”

Given that the President’s
birth
certificate proves (again) that he was born in Hawaii, what did these
investigators find that they couldn’t believe?

These questions were put to
Mr.
Trump in New Hampshire on Wednesday. What were the investigators
finding? One time he responded, “I got him to give his birth
certificate. No one else did, and most of the press is
congratulating me.”

And at his news conference,
he was
asked directly, “Were you making this up? Where does this
information come from?”

His answer? “No, what I
think
you are going to see, first we have to look at the certificate,
but I am really happy that this has finally taken place. Because we
have some major issues that are unbelievably important.”

When told by this reporter
that
he did not answer the question, his response was: “I think I did, I
did. I did answer the question.”

Donald Trump was clearly bullshitting people when he claimed that the
people he had "on the ground" in Hawaii "could not believe what they're
finding." He evidently didn't expect President Obama would
actually go to the trouble of getting his long-form
"Certificate of Live Birth" released. That's a common error
committed by bullshitters - assuming that their opponent will continue
to ignore them as he has done in the past. (But, if he suddenly
stops ignoring them, they can always attack him for taking so long to
respond, and thus they can avoid discussing what he had to say.)

The real question is: Does Donald Trump actually
believe anything he's saying,
or is he just trying to get other people to believe it? Is his
bullshitting just a tactic for achieving whatever it is that he wants
to achieve? That could definitely
be the case. He certainly seems to think he's smarter than most
people, because he's made more money than most people. Making
money seems to be is his measure of intelligence. Also, people
who believe his bullshit must obviously be less intelligent than he is
because they come to him for inspiration and advice. That feeds
his ego. And, in his mind, anyone attacking him is just jealous
of his success. If Donald Trump is a True Believer, his belief is
a
firm, unshakable belief that he's one of the smartest man on the planet
and the world's best manipulator of people. Therefore, he may
actually believe that he's entitled
to be The Leader of the Free World.

His problem is (hopefully): He's fooling only the dumbest of the
dumb. The
rest are watching him for amusement. The
Huffington Post suggests, "We need Trump to provide samples of his
DNA to prove he's actually a carbon-based life form."
The Los Angeles Times
article I cited at the beginning of my comment for today also contains
this:

Until very recently, if
every
professional news organization in the nation examined a charge and
found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes — dropped. Today, the growth of the Internet has
drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the
facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you
simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your
beliefs.

"There are no more arbiters of truth," former White House Press
Secretary Robert Gibbs told the Politico website. "So whatever you can prove factually,
somebody else can find something else and point to it with enough
ferocity to get people to believe it. We've
crossed some Rubicon into the unknown."

Yes, we have "crossed some Rubicon into the
unknown." Just as Julius Caesar did
in 49 BC, we've stepped into an unknown territory, and there is no
turning back. We're in a territory of cell phones and the
Internet, where individuals can routinely communicate with each other
and the rest of the world. If someone has a totally ridiculous
idea, he or she can probably find dozens of people who totally agree -
and at least one "expert" who will validate the idea.
And, by talking together they can convince themselves that their
ridiculous idea is the sublime truth.

It was a lot more difficult to find like-minded people before the era
of cell phones and the Internet. In the previous era, a person
could type his thoughts on a mimeograph sheet in order to distribute it
on street corners, or they could send it off to people on a mailing
list. But there was no mimeograph Google to instantly find other people who
share the same interests all across
the globe.

People looking for facts can often instantly find and verify
facts. People with beliefs can usually instantly find other
people who have similar beliefs.

I started writing these comments nearly 10 years ago when I saw a need
in discussions about the anthrax attacks of 2001 to distinguish between
"experts" with facts and "experts" with beliefs.

There's still that need. I keep hoping someone will come up with
a simple checklist which will help people distinguish one kind of
"expert" from another. There's definitely a clear pattern to the
way all the "truthers" think and operate. And, it's very
different from the way "experts" with solid facts think and
operate. Unfortunately, part of the pattern for the "truthers" is
that they won't allow themselves to be put in a situation where they
have to discuss facts. When confronted with facts, they simply
reject the facts as meaningless. Here's the pattern again as it
applies to the Anthrax Truthers:

FBI/DOJ
Evidence

Anthrax
Truthers' Response

1

Ivins was fascinated
with
secret
codes. He put a hidden message in the anthrax letters he sent to
the media.

There was no
hidden message in the letters,
and, if there was, it was written by someone else.

2

Ivins
tried to destroy the book and magazine he used to encode a hidden
message in the media letters.

That's
not proof of anything. Many people own that book and magazine.

3

The hidden message
in the
media letters
related to two of Ivins' colleagues, one by name (PAT) and the other by
attacking
her favorite city (FNY).

It's
just a coincidence. It doesn't prove anything.

4

Ivins had used
similar
DNA-based coding in
an
email sent to a colleague.

It's
just a coincidence. It doesn't prove anything.

5

The anthrax letters
were
placed in the
mailbox nearest to the Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) office in Princeton,
NJ. Ivins had
an obsession with the KKG sorority.

It's
just a coincidence. It doesn't prove anything.

6

Ivins used ZIP Code
08852
on the senate
letters. That ZIP Code is for Monmouth
Junction, NJ, where Ivins' family on his father's side came from.
And,
Monmouth College in Monmouth, IL, is where the KKG sorority was founded.

It's
just a coincidence. It doesn't prove anything.

7

Ivins had traveled
through
Princeton, NJ,
with his parents he
was a child, but, when asked during the investigation, he told
investigators that
he'd never been to Princeton.

He just
forgot.
Everyone forgets
things.
That's not proof of anything. It's just a coincidence.

8

Ivins' father
graduated
from Princeton
University.

It's
just a coincidence. It doesn't prove anything.

9

Ivins frequently
drove
long distances to
mail things so they couldn't be traced back to him.

That doesn't mean he
sent
the anthrax
letters.

10

Ivins frequently
drove
long distances at
night without the knowledge of his wife and family.